Leaves of Glass

now we are five. (with apologies to A.A. Milne)

2012-01-09T13:31:00.011-06:00

Next Monday, Leaves of Glass will turn 5. I launched my shop on Etsy on January 16, 2007. In planning and preparing to celebrate, I've gone down a memory lane rabbit hole and have ended up with a pretty hard case of nostalgia and gratitude.

I decided that it would be fun to re-release some of my early designs, providing I could find the bits to make them. While I was browsing through pages of my old sold items, I was reminded of so many amazing people I've met. Many of them are long-time customers who have become friends; several came to me with fascinating and beautiful ideas for custom pieces; and a very precious group of fellow artists and crafters have become close and beloved friends. Every page I went through brought back something else I'd forgotten about, and I ended up in a little flurry of remember-when emails and tweets with friends. I'm feeling a lot of gratitude and happiness this week.

The Leaves Redux designs will be available in my shop on Big Cartel starting Monday, January 16th. I'll also have a sale beginning Friday, January 13 and continuing through the 20th. Details for that will be going out to my mailing list on Friday morning. If you'd like to be added to my newsletter list, please subscribe using the link to the left.

Thank you for 5 great years!

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

color friends

2011-12-14T12:16:00.006-06:00

Shana and I have a long and happy history of feeding each other's creative energy. Lately this has focused on color (after some mutual customers commented on Twitter that they liked how our work looked together, and having "jewelry that are friends." Awesome.), and we've been making some pieces with the same names and colorstories. You can see some of hers here, and we're working on adding a colorfriends tag so you can see them all together on Etsy. These are some of mine for this week:

Why, yes, I do think they turned out well. Thank you.

party in oakbrook!

2011-11-22T08:32:00.003-06:00

I've been invited to participate in a holiday pop-up shop co-sponsored by Etsy and west elm. There are a number of these happening at west elm stores all over the country; I'll be at the Oakbrook store on Thursday, Dec. 1 from 6-9 p.m. If you're a west surburban fan of urban legend, come out and see me; I'm looking forward to it! My friends CircaCeramics and Laura George will be there, too. If you don't want to come for me, you should really come for them. They're very good, and I won't feel slighted at all.

Shops At Oakbrook Place
2155 West 22nd Street
Oakbrook, IL 60523
630.368.3591

nerd sunday

2011-10-23T12:22:00.003-05:00

I had the nicest morning. I got up early and went to meet my lovely friends for breakfast at Marmalade. We all enjoyed breakfast nerdistry (I had a butternut squash & leek crepe, with dried cherry chicken sausage in a red wine reduction and scrambled eggs), and each of our separate nerdistries involving stamps, babies, ceramics, comic books, beads, craft shows, letterpress, letter writing, boobs, girl scouts, the history of punch, absent friends, and small business chatter. After that, I got a massage and had some Pacific-Northwest-and-the-wearing-of-tights nerd chat with my wonderful massage therapist. Then I went to the comic book store, and geeked out over Unwritten, jack-o-lanterns, small business branding, Swamp Thing, Sweet Tooth, and John Carpenter's The Thing (I missed a screening they did last night. Boo.). To top off my morning, I went to the liquor store and engaged in some heavy enthusiasm over a case of vintage ports that the wine nerd just scored.

The rush of enthusiasm endorphins will sustain me for a while. I'm reminded of Wil Wheaton talking about John Green's quote about being a nerd. It's been blogged and tweeted and tumblr'd several thousand times, but one more won't hurt. Watch it again, and enjoy liking stuff. I'm gonna drink my tea and watch The Thing on Netflix.

adding survey & mailing list functions to paypal

2011-10-21T09:22:00.004-05:00

I don't usually do business tip posts on this blog, but it took me so long to figure this out, and I encountered so many people along the way who said, "Gee, I don't know, but will you let me know if you find it?" that I decided it was worth a simple, illustrated tutorial.

If you're a seller and you want to add a survey, gift options, or mailing list subscription to the PayPal checkout page your customer sees, here's how you do it.

After logging in, hover on the Profile link and choose More Options:

Select My Selling Tools:
Select Update on Custom payment pages:

Click on the Options tab:

Voila! Make your changes and save:

a lesson in fervor from a Stoic

2011-10-20T14:13:00.002-05:00

Leslie's teaching the Handbook of Epictetus in her AP Great Books class, and she called a couple of nights ago to read this passage to me.

"If you now neglect things and are lazy and are always making delay after delay and set one day after another as the day for paying attention to yourself, then without realizing it you will make no progress, but will end up a non-philosopher all through life and death. So decide now that you are worthy of living as a full-grown man who is making progress, and make everything that seems best be a law that you cannot go against. And if you meet with any hardship or anything pleasant or reputable or disreputable, then remember that the contest is now and the Olympic games are now and you cannot put things off any more and that your progress is made or destroyed by a single day and a single action. Socrates became fully perfect in this way, by not paying attention to anything but his reason in everything that he met with. You, even if you are not yet Socrates, ought to live as someone wanting to be Socrates."

Amazing. No wonder she won't shut up about him.

occasional poetry.

2011-10-19T12:22:00.002-05:00

I finally remembered to buy sugar so I can make bread next weekend.

Bread

The dough rises in the sun,
history of the human race inside it:
orgies, famines, Christianity,
eras when a man could have his arm
chopped off for stealing half a loaf.
I punch it down, knead the dark
flour into the light, let it bake,
then set it on the table beside the knife,
learning the power
cooks have over others, the pleasure
of saying eat.

by Helena Minton
from Poetry magazine, May 1981

occasional poetry.

2011-10-04T15:03:00.002-05:00

I love that Gary Soto never uses the word or the image I'm expecting to turn up in the next line. This is from Poetry Magazine, July 1981.

Hitchhiking With a Friend and a Book That Explains the Pacific Ocean

One 41, outside Stratford,
The sky lengthens magically
When you're 19, the first time
On the road - and if you're
With a friend, the birds life
And never come down in the same place.
I found myself out there, with Samuel,
Hungry as a fire, kicking rocks,
Under clouds giving up
Just as we came to believe in beauty.
It was that word, and others,
That had us pointing
To windmills and sullen cows,
The trees irresponsible with their shadows.
And it was the eagerness of grass under wind, a tumbleweed
Moving, a paper bag moving,
And our minds clear as water
Pooled on roadsides. We went
On for hours. The gravel
Turned under our march,
Until the landscape meant less,
And we grew tired. A banged
Truck stopped for us
And the driver's giddy dog licked
And nuzzles our necks
All through the foothills, toward Pismo Beach.
Two hours, two beers, and the sky
Hazed with mist. When we saw
A rough cut of sea through trees,
We tilted our heads, nudged each
Other's ribs, at the blue
Of waves that would end at our feet.

by Gary Soto

no. really?

2011-10-03T15:00:00.005-05:00

Has it actually been over a month since I posted ANYthing here? That's no good. Especially since I've been working on lots of new designs, reading stacks of good things, and working on embroidery projects. There's lots to catch up on. I've also inherited a pile of back issues of Poetry magazine and plan to start posting some oldies but goodies here (from back when Tess Gallagher had new volumes being published and Billy Collins was but a gleam in the eye of the University of Arkansas Press...).

Until I actually get on that, though, I have nothing to offer you but sneak peeks. Coming up in tomorrow's shop update at urban legend, we have a Bunch of Pink Things, and A Few Things That Are Less Pink:

lingering over a treat.

2011-08-31T12:13:00.003-05:00

I love this painting. It's evocative and full of light and I love the old school common room charm of it. I bought it a couple of weeks ago from Mercer's Daughter on Etsy, and when the package arrived every single aspect of it was so delightful that I took pictures as I unwrapped it, for bragging purposes. (She even sent me a little packet of beads and jewelry to upcycle.)

Here's my small treasure, nesting happily on my bookshelves (next to a tiny bowl by CircaCeramics, filled with tiny tubes of perfume oil...). Small things are the nicest.

books and more books.

2011-07-29T13:04:00.002-05:00

I returned to Goodreads recently, after an absence of, oh, three years? Something like that. I was shocked to find that I remembered my login information. They've made some nifty changes since the last time I was there, and now you can post your reviews to your blog with a click. So I'm gonna. I read this last Sunday (on my no-internet-one-day-a-week program).

The Archivist by Martha Cooley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was recommended to me by the greatest reader I've ever known, with the description "It's like The Hours for boys." The themes of isolation, mental illness, historical literary figures and love of reading are common to both books, but I'll revise the "for boys" part of that characterization. The main character is a man, but it's still the women who hold center stage, and it's still the women who suffer from crippling mental illness. The archivist is the recorder of their larger-than-his lives. So, well done, title.

Pleasantly written and enjoyable, but ultimately unsatisfying. The primary conflict of the novel is engrossing and well paced, but the resolution was a fizzle. My favorite thing about it was that it reintroduced me to the poetry of LeRoi Jones, which I haven't read for many years. Also, quite lovely descriptions of the mercurial task of trying to grasp the whole idea when reading TS Eliot.

View all my reviews

local love

2011-07-21T09:23:00.003-05:00

This weekend, I have the honor of being the featured showcase artist at RR#1 during the West Town Art Walk. RR#1 was my first wholesale account, and they remain my biggest fans and best supporters in my small corner of the handmade jewelry world. The shop is beautiful. Housed in a former apothecary, it retains the original wood and glass fixtures, rolling ladders and tin ceiling, and is home to a meticulously curated collection of gifts and papergoods. (The RR is for Red Rooster.) I’m proud of my long association with this lovely shop, and I’m so pleased to be participating this weekend!

The West Town Art Walk will be held on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, July 22-24. Details and a list of participating businesses can be found on the Facebook page for the event.

I’ve made lots of new pieces for this weekend, almost all of them one of a kind. You can see a small sample in the sneak peeks below. I hope they’re tempting enough to bring my Chicago fans out in the heat to enjoy some music and shopping (in air conditioning!).

I’ll be at RR#1 on Friday night from 7-10, and I hope to see you there! The shop is located at 814 North Ashland at Ashland and Chicago.

2011-07-15T12:28:00.001-05:00

It's summer sale time at urban legend!

Necklaces are 10% off and earrings & bracelets are 20% off

through Sunday, July 17.

bookmobile.

2011-07-13T07:00:00.001-05:00

In my ongoing "someday I'll move" project, I'm clearing out cabinets and closets and shelves and beginning to get rid of stuff. So far, this is mostly books. Ok, to be honest, it's going to be mostly books all the way through. And some movies and CDs and maybe a couple of bottles of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfumes. The rest will be kitchen things and clothes that are currently entombed in my storage rental, and they'll get donated somewhere.

I planned to list books on ebay to send them on to homes where they'll be loved and appreciated, but I find that the prospect of launching and maintaining one more internet presence has paralyzed me. I'm going to try listing them here first, and if anyone's interested I'll gladly sell them to you. Just email me and I'll send you a PayPal invoice and pop them in the mail. Voila! Wonderful new books for you, with my deepest thanks. If there's interest and it goes well, I'll keep adding to the list. If not, well, it'll be back to ebay with me.

I'm going to call it $2 for paperbacks and $5 for hardcovers, but no reasonable offer refused. If you're interested in a bunch of titles and want to offer me a flat total, make an offer. If you'd like to see a photograph of the actual book, I have them. (I got that far into the listing process before getting overwhelmed.)

Here's what I've dug out so far, in no particular order.

In paperback:

Seventy-Seven Clocks by Christopher Fowler

Another You by Ann Beattie

Love, Always by Ann Beattie

Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie

Antartica (short stories) by Clare Keegan

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

Days of Obligation by Richard Rodriguez

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall

Off the Beaten Path: Stories of Place by collected authors

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

The Sin Eater by Alice Ellis

The Hidden by Tobias Hill

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolfe (signed by author)

When the Messenger is Hot by Elizabeth Crane

Naked by David Sedaris

Vox by Nicholson Baker (this one's hardcover, but it's pretty beat up)

In hardcover:

A Gesture Life by Chang Rae Lee

Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt

City Life by Witold Rybczynski

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney

Cross Channel by Julian Barnes

Excursions in the Real World by William Trevor

Night Train by Martin Amis

Experience by Martin Amis

My Movie Business: A Memoir by John Irving

Life at These Speeds by Jeremy Jackson

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem

Lake Effect by Rich Cohen

The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

summer love.

2011-07-12T15:37:00.003-05:00

Maple Bourbon Lemonade. From Smitten Kitchen.

report from hermitpalooza 2011.

2011-07-06T14:12:00.005-05:00

My three days of no internet & no phone were an unqualified success. It felt very peaceful and purposeful, and seems to have given my neck knot time to heal. Apparently that's from the way I sit at the computer, not from the way I sit when I work. The more you know...

As it turned out, I did end up spending most of the time hermitted in my apartment. On Friday I slept sinfully late and spent most of the rest of the day rereading Ender's Game. It's still brilliant and painful. I cleaned the already mostly clean kitchen and watched something vague on TV while I tidied up my workspace. My parents called, and I answered. Because I am not a monster.

Saturday, I made a quick run to the grocery store and then made sourdough bread and a triple batch of pickled red onions. Oh, vinegar and sugary, peppery spice! Four days later, the house still smells faintly of brine when I come in from outside. I made a list of all the things I want to get done this summer. I separated it into things that required the internet, and things that could be started right away. I got several of the non-internet things done, pulled books for an ambitious summer reading/rereading list, and then started reading Geek Love. Dysfunctional carnival family rabbit hole, meet Kateri.

Sunday morning, I lingered over coffee and Geek Love, took lots and lots and lots of new product photographs, and then did the rest of the short-term non-internet projects. I gathered information I might need later for the internet projects and redid my list, along with a rough calendar for the next six weeks. I went back to Geek Love, and finished it Sunday evening over a beautiful sushi dinner. (It's an incredible book. The writing is wonderful, and the scope of the misery is operatic. I didn't like any of the characters, with the exception of one peripheral character. Some of them were sympathetic, and many of them were occasionally lovable, but they were all fundamentally unlikable. I think that's a major achievement: a perfectly paced novel of unmitigated misery and dysfunction that's thoroughly enjoyable and compelling.)

My three days were delightful, and a reminder of how much I can accomplish without feeling rushed, and still have hours and hours to devote to reading. It's not possible or desirable to live that way all the time, but it's a good short-term habit for me. I ended up resolving to take one day a week off from phone and internet for the rest of the summer. Sundays, probably. It's much harder to do that during the school year, when I need the whole weekend to run the business that I neglect during the week. I'll just try to soak up my focus and silence while I can get it this summer.

how to take a mini vacation without ever leaving your house.

2011-06-30T13:51:00.003-05:00

This weekend, Leaves of Glass is going dark.

I'm two weeks into my summer vacation already, and I still haven't written The List of Things to do on Summer Vacation. Mostly this is because I was launched into it at breakneck speed while still packing up my office for painting/new carpet, chased by three wholesale orders and a bulk order. There wasn't time to consider the needs of summer vacation until I was already in it. I haven't even made a reading list, something I usually have ready by March.

So far, I've spent my lovely summer days catching up on the contents of my Google Reader (you have 1000+ unread items!), saying yes every time Leslie calls and says "Do you want to...", and moving the plastic bead collection into a truly staggering pile of boxes for easier access. In the last four days, I've also co-founded the Summer 2011 WHAT? Film Festival, with Shana. You'll be able to read more about that here in the near future. Boiled down to its pure essence, the film festival involves finding the oddest movies we can both access via Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, and watching them together over the phone. We're very confused, so it's a rousing success.

None of this, enjoyable as it is, constitutes a plan for the 8 weeks of the year that belong solely to me. I need a plan for this time, or it just slips pleasantly away in bourbon drinks and naps. This particular summer has kind of large demands on it, since I'm supposed to be using it to prepare for my (eventual) move to Portland.

I've made a plan to make plans. Distraction is my enemy, so I'm taking Friday, Saturday and Sunday off from phone and internet. I won't actually hermit myself in my apartment the entire time, but it sounded good for a title, don't you think? There will be no Twitter, no blogging, no posting of new items or relisting of sold items, no phone calls, no texting and no email. For three days. Unless my parents call. I'm not a monster. I'll put an announcement in my shop that I'm away for the weekend and will respond to convos on Monday. The next ship date for both shops will be Tuesday, July 5 (no mail on Monday because the nation is independent).

In this age of constant presence, I thought it was best to say that I haven't fallen into a ditch. I'll be back on Monday, and will need you to catch me up on all the news. Wish me luck!

promises, promises.

2011-06-29T15:30:00.003-05:00

In which I swear to do real blogging soon. It's summer and I have things to talk about. This one, however, is a quickie. I finally listed some new designs at Leaves of Glass today - lots of light & dark contrast, with my trademark grit & sparkle. Here's a peek, and you can see all the new pieces in the shop:

turning 1,000.

2011-05-27T13:14:00.004-05:00

Hello, candyfans - I can hardly believe it, but urban legend is sneaking up on the 1,000th sale mark on Etsy. To celebrate this momentously round number, I'll be sending a thank you prize to the buyer who turns the speedometer over to 1,000: a $50.00 gift certificate for urban legend, and a little something extra which shall remain nameless. Thank you for your support and enthusiasm, and for making it so much fun for me to make jewelry!
You're the best.
Please don't eat the jewelry,

Kateri

aw, shucks.

2011-05-23T10:31:00.004-05:00

The mail carrier was busy last week bringing me lots and lots of just-because presents - my favorite kind. Here are some of the treats that appeared in my mailbox from nice friends. Thank you!

Susan made me a tote bag with prom fabric inside, and a bonus cosmetic bag with, um, not prom fabric inside.

Morgan sent me a comforting, maple sugary taste of home and an excellent note.

Shana sent me more wonderful things than I can possibly list here, but among them were lots and lots of beads and yoyos:

And a very sweet customer sent me a really special vintage celluloid necklace, which I'm quietly adoring for a while before I take it apart for beads.

i got ochre on my converse.

2011-05-20T10:03:00.005-05:00

I've been taking a beginner's painting class, and having struggles. Every Monday night, Leslie and I pack up our free-with-class satchels of acrylic paints and brushes, and go eat at a diner. That's not the hard part; I'm really good at diners. Then we spend three hours in a nice big room painting. Our instructor is a wisp-thin peanut-sized woman with a very deep voice and the flattest Plains accent I've ever heard. She says wonderful things like, "I could tell you a story about the 1800's and why that happened," or "I'm telling you for the fourth time: she lacked vision." She gets excited about the seven different kinds of folds, or Sargent's uncanny prowess at painting hands.

Every single thing about this class is too hard for me. I choose terrible places to set up my easel and end up with a hinky perspective. I'm paranoid about my non-existent drawing skills and spend way too long trying to get a shape right before starting to paint, and then end up with a flat texture-less picture. I have no sense of placement or composition. I can't see colors as they actually are, I invent impossible geometry, and I have trouble with spotting highlights. It's like every instinct I have deserts me when I get in there. In spite of all this - actually, probably because of it - I'm really enjoying it. Leslie said it best - it's a three hour problem that's none of my usual problems. It's completely absorbing. There's no time or room to think about anything except what I'm doing. So I'm having a really good time with new words, techniques and ways to think about things. While I'm not going to be any better at painting after the class is over, I'll have learned a lot and enjoyed five weeks of time well spent outside my comfort zone.

Plus, I have paint on my gray Converse slip-ons. Total street cred.

glassy sneak peeks.

2011-04-15T14:40:00.003-05:00

Last weekend I was finally inspired with some fresh ideas for vintage glass designs. I like bold colors and mostly simple lines at the moment (although there is one pair of messy mismatch in here, and I'm really pleased with them). I was thinking about an idea two of my friends have for superhero school, and the classes that would need to be offered, and suddenly I was off and running with ideas. Don't ask me how it works, I don't know...

Oh, and a tiny taste of urban legend, for good measure:

weekend colorstories.

2011-04-08T09:45:00.002-05:00

These are the palettes I'll be playing with this weekend (via Color Collective). Pretty, yes? I'm looking forward to a couple of days of good work; I have a lot of beads I haven't used yet in some excellent new colors. (I'm also looking forward to a couple of days of sleeping in and pajamas - happy Friday.)

spring cleaning.

2011-04-07T09:21:00.003-05:00

I've started to work on some new glass designs - finally! I'm looking forward to photographing them this weekend. In anticipating listing them, I realized I'm nearly out of room in my shop. Which means it's time for an impromptu spring cleaning sale. Use the code SPARKLEFRENZY to get 30% off your order in my Big Cartel shop.

And keep your eyes open for new work in the next few weeks - I'm excited!

respite.

2011-03-24T12:07:00.005-05:00

It hasn't been a hot time in the old town lately. Work's been tense, I've been sick twice in a month, and in the last 48 hours winter decided it wasn't finished talking yet. I'm looking forward to the start of spring break (in 26 hours).

I got a beautiful early respite yesterday, though, in the form of a knee-weakeningly good meal at Girl & the Goat with my friend Natalie. She made the reservations for us some time ago, and I forgot about it until she mentioned it on Tuesday morning. For the next 24 hours, I pinned all my anxiety and work tension and the itchy feelings* I borrowed from other anxious people and my achy discomfort and my cold bones on the moment when I would get to walk through the door of this legendary restaurant, sit down, drink a calming glass of wine, and have comforting, exciting, thoughtful food lavished upon me. As absurd as it sounds to hang my peace of mind on the success of that moment, that's exactly how it happened.

I got to Randolph with -3 minutes to spare, and found Natalie already sitting by the window and the host ready to seat us. It was our lucky night, and no one had claimed the chef's table, so we got to sit right on the kitchen line and watch everything happen. While chatting up the prep chefs and asking questions about everything.

My calming glass of wine was the house white: Girl & the Goat Columbia Valley Semillon-Viognier. Sweet and rich, but nicely balanced and not like drinking dessert. I warmed up. My shoulders slowly came down from around my ears to a normal shoulder-type level.

Oh, and then we ordered food. I sing a song of dinner, in the order in which it appeared (my staggering accuracy here is the result of a purloined menu):

loompa bread (I didn't think to keep one of the little bread & specials menus, so this one is to the best of my recollection) - artisan bread with cumin and nuts, served with a raisin & nut butter & carrot oil. If you've never had a cold sweet white wine with a mildly spicy bread dipped in carrot oil, I recommend it.

chickpea fritters. romesco. hazelnut hummus. sesame. goat feta. As if this doesn't sounds wonderful enough already, it was sprinkled with a handful of deep fried chickpeas, all golden and crispy and melting the goat feta ever so slightly. Texture extravaganza - hearty foods in delicate forms.

seared scallops. brown butter XO. goat sausage. shiitakes. winter squash. I chose this for the goat sausage and winter squash elements - must have goat. The scallops were perfect - sweet and delicious, and that wonderful scallop tenderness that's so velvety it's almost liquid.

grilled bison butt. sausage vinaigrette. pink lemon. black trumpet. This was Natalie's choice, because "I totally came here to eat the butt of some bison." Our server said "She puts these things on the menu so she can yell 'We got butt! We got pig face!' all night." (Which did happen.) And really, if you had the power to serve pig face and make people want it, why wouldn't you? We didn't order pig face (wood oven roasted pig face. sunny side egg. tamarind. cilantro. potato stix), but we watched carefully to see what it looked like when it came off the line, and Natalie got the giggles pointing out that it had egg on its face. Excellent.

Anyway, back to the bison butt. It was a strong flavor, but gamey is the wrong word for it. I still haven't figured out the right word for it. I could taste the grass and outdoorsness of it. I said, "It tastes so...so..." Natalie said, "Real?". Yes, exactly. It tasted real. Like an animal. I'm not certain that I liked it, but I liked the experience of eating it.

sauteed green beans. fish sauce vinaigrette. cashews. Lately I've been roasting green beans and big chunks of garlic, instead of my usual asparagus; this was the amped-up superhero version of that. I don't know what god you have to sacrifice to in order to find such fat and magnificent green beans during Smarch, but good job. Fish sauce vinaigrette, good job. Cashews, good job. My shoulders were now kind of slumped as I was completely relaxed and propped up on the bar, perusing the wine menu in a lazy fashion.

We had lots of people taking care of us all evening long, but were primarily served by our left-flank server, who recommended dishes and answered questions and took our order, and our right-flank server, who brought us our food. I should have noticed their names, but I didn't. Left suggested the Substance Columbia Valley Merlot to accompany the next dish. It was absolutely the right thing - light and a bit woodsy and really good without being shouty about it. A nice balance to the very rich meats.

goat, pork, and veal sugo. pappardelle. rosemary. ground cherries. According to Joel, the patient and gracious prep chef we got to pester all night, the ground cherries were actually gooseberries. He said they had pickled gooseberries earlier in the year, and that sounds so good that I'm going to have to hunt some down for pickling this summer. They look like tiny orange cherry tomatoes, but are neither sweet nor savory. The flavor is delicate and earthy and juicy and distinctive and not something I feel I can adequately describe. The word yummy was mentioned. Everything we ate was so delicious, and so satisfying, and so genuine, but I think the sugo was my favorite.

By now, I was in a comfort haze. Natalie was eating sugo. I was reading the wine list for pleasure and edification, and watching something crispy come out of the wood oven. Someone came up by my elbow and said, "How is everything, guys?" I thought it was Right Flank checking on us, and sort of shifted my head a bit and said, "Amazing, thank you" but didn't really connect. And that's how I came to accidentally snub the chef. Stephanie Izard, clever hands, wizardish food sense and superstrength hair - who made me feel so pleasant and cared for that I just couldn't even sit all the way up and say hi.

bittersweet chocolate . shiitake gelato . creme fraiche. Dessert also had some kind of golden sauce drizzled on it - maybe an apricot thing? I was too stoned on amazing flavors by then to absorb all the information. The chocolate cake was embellished by crumbled chocolate cookie, and the bittersweet crunchy crumbs in tangy creme fraiche...well, good.

We followed that with coffee, and I begged a couple of slices of caperberry off of Joel. I recognized what they were, but I'd never tasted one, so he gave us a little dish of thin yellow-green, seedy caperberry slices. I tasted it and pronounced it "earth pickle." Natalie promptly requested a new necklace design called earth pickle.

And then I went home, full of good things. We'll just pretend the muzak incident in the cab never happened, and will speak no more about it.

*This is Shana's expression; I think it's brilliant.

postcards from the playground, week 4.

2011-03-14T11:54:00.003-05:00

This week's results are something of a hodgepodge, mainly inspired by two straight weekends of watching Carnivale, combined with just using whatever grabbed my eye. I had a small inspiration with the long curved hooks, turning a much larger loop than usual and hammering it to make the loop a design element. I was pleased with that, and I also really like the quite weird and beautifully colored blue chain earrings. For the most part I don't keep things I make, but this is the last pair of these beautiful green beads and these earrings are staying with me:

The other three pairs will be listed in le shoppe tomorrow.

i want candy.

2011-03-10T10:53:00.006-06:00

My urbanlegend shop is turning 2 years old this month. That's 2 years of making big, fun, candy-looking, please-don't-eat-the jewelry, and I've enjoyed every minute so far. I've also placed no less than 10 orders for beads in the last two weeks, so you can look forward to yet more fun new stuff - and I can look forward to trying to figure out where I'm going to put everything.

To celebrate this sugary bounty, I'll be having a sale from Friday, March 11 (that's tomorrow!) through Wednesday, March 16. Use the code IWANTCANDY in the coupon box of the Etsy checkout to take 20% off your order. Thanks for being a friend to urbanlegend, and I hope to see you in the candy store.

Etsy
urbanlegend

colors & where they come from.

2011-03-09T13:26:00.005-06:00

I get ideas from all kinds of places, but one of my favorite games is to find a photograph, or a page in a catalog, or a swatch on a color blog (Creative Holly Color or Color-Collective, for example) and try to match vintage Lucite beads to my source. It's sort of like doing a puzzle - it often takes me several tries to get four or five colors or tones into an arrangement that actually echoes the source image. I think it's fun. I'm nerdy that way. Here are some colorstories that turned into necklaces:

Beach Umbrella Fine Art Photograph by alicebgardens;
nostalgia necklace (coming next week)

swatch taken from color-collective;
mycology necklace

swatch taken from color-collective;
poranj necklace

City Center One - Art Print by tuesdaymoon;
city center necklace

Tak-Tak à la plage collage by Ma + Chr;
boardwalk necklace

postcards from the playground, week 3.

2011-03-07T12:42:00.006-06:00

This week, chestnut brown patina was my constant playmate. Useful because it's a fairly neutral finish, but much richer and softer than the oxidized finish produced by liver of sulfur. I used it to darken and roughen the blinding bright copper leaves I bought some time ago, and I used it to make two nostalgic pieces in soft colors. I'm not 100% in love with the balance on the cluster earrings, but the rule was that I'd post whatever I did during playground month. So here they are. I do think the colors are lovely, and the vintage brass ball weights on the bottom are one of my most treasured finds. I also made a sweet little pair of sugar bead earrings in the same palette, but without patina.

And never fear, I played in the plastic sandbox too. Here's a peek at some of tomorrow's upcoming candy goodness:

this week in the sandbox.

2011-02-28T13:54:00.003-06:00

Two things got made. Two. Two whole things. I'm happy with both of them. They'll be listed in Tuesday's shop update.

Pua Polu Earrings.

Perpetrator Bracelet.

i love this so much.

2011-02-24T14:52:00.000-06:00

I wish my reorganizations looked this great. And had a zippy little soundtrack.

postcard from the playground.

2011-02-21T12:28:00.002-06:00

This is the collection of beads I wound up with after editing my supplies. It still looks like a huge amount, but it's less than 10% of what I have. I was feeling lazy yesterday morning, so I didn't want to actually unpack all of them - which means you get a not so pretty picture. These are the only glass beads I'm allowed to work with for a whole month. Any silver materials or chain I have are fair game, but I even edited the vintage metals down to just a few things. I do have one trick up my sleeve so I feel like I have something new. Just before Christmas I bought a tutorial and patina kit from missficklemedia, and last weekend I put the finishing touches on my first batch of colored metals (boy howdy, that's a lot of work - highly recommended, though, it's an excellent tutorial). If I can bring myself to cut into the chain and/or use the bits, you'll start to see them in new pieces shortly.

So. I promised to show everything I made during this experiment. Here are the first three pieces. This pair of earrings is something I had partially in mind since last week, but I grubbied it up with oxidized raw copper beads from Africa. The pearls are whiter than the ones I usually use - almost silvery. It was very cloudy yesterday, so these aren't as clear as I'd like - it's hard to tell how sparkly these are.

I'm on the fence about this pair. I loved them when I made them, and then half an hour later I hated them. Now I'm feeling iffy. I love the colors. I love all the beads. I think it's the double ovals that are tripping me up. But I made them according to the rules. Start with a thing I like, and no plan, and go from there.

This pair is my favorite of the batch. They're extra weird, but I think they work really well - I love it when odd pieces combine into something that looks like a whole. I started with a flat white metal tab and manhandled it until it looked like something I could use. I didn't use protected tools and I didn't refinish or seal the metal, so these have all the flaking paint and tool marks and weird shaping you'd expect. It took me a couple of tries to figure out how I could hang the weird saddle-shaped thingies I made, but with a little help from a draw-down punch, it all worked out. All three pairs will be listed at Leaves of Glass in tomorrow's shop update.

artist self-check

2011-02-18T17:57:00.004-06:00

I made this bracelet exactly three years ago. It remains one of my favorite pieces, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I've avoided digging up the picture to look at it, but as it happens a wise and lovely friend also stumbled upon it recently, and emailed me about it. I've been having one of my dullard phases with design lately, mostly where my vast collection of vintage glass is concerned, and seeing the picture clarified some of my struggles for me. In responding to my friend's email, I articulated some of the things that are currently bothering me about my process. This is what I replied:

"it's funny that you should stumble on that bracelet. it's been on my mind a lot lately. i'm realizing that my designs seem to have lost that dirty, scrappy look that i exploited so well early on. i've gotten much more structured, much more streamlined, and i feel like i've lost the astounding sense of discovery that i used to feel when i finished something - particularly that whole series of rusty and unbalanced pieces [this refers to a series I called Urban Seaweed]. my process has changed so much, and i miss it. i'd just start with something and wire it up and then put something next to it and then fiddle with some other things and maybe they'd come together and then suddenly there would be something so right that i knew how to finish it. i don't work that way anymore and i miss it. i've been uncertain how to get it back. i think partly it has to do with my having too many supplies - those pieces happened when i had much less to work with and i was excited about all of it. my new year's resolution not to buy any more glass supplies for a while has something to do with that. i've realized lately that i shop for supplies when i'm bored and need a perk. it always works out well to have them, but it means that i don't think creatively about what i have in the same way. i'm experiencing my supplies as tools instead of something that i communicate with, and i need that to stop. i'd often finish something but not be certain what it meant until i was photographing it. now, i often start with a name or a color scheme and build from there, and while it seems logical, it's actually ass-backward to the more satisfying and authentic way that i used to work."

My friend had some smart things to say about this, and the upshot is that I'm planning to spend part of this weekend building myself a much smaller pool of glass supplies from the staggering pile of boxes in my work corner. I'll select things that I find exciting, trying not to think at all about what I'll do with them, and then use those to create with for one month. And only those. No cheating, and certainly no buying anything new. We'll see how it goes. There are certain to be some colossal duds, but I'm going to try to post everything here, whether I hate it or not.

i really miss austin.

2011-02-14T14:24:00.002-06:00

there's a necklace for that.

shop update at big cartel

2011-02-08T09:21:00.004-06:00

This week's shop update is entirely blizzard-inspired. During my snow days last week, I made two enormous and sparkly bracelets, and one dainty pair of golden teardrop earrings. The bracelets are both one of a kind and cannot be repeated.

that was fun.

2011-02-07T10:08:00.004-06:00

I spent the weekend holding metal over a flame and then dropping it into a cup of brightly colored liquid, where it sizzled and spat and hissed and clanked. Then I fished it out, and repeated the process over and over and over until I had a whole sheet full of vintage metal and chain covered in lustrous colors. These components still need to be sealed, but they'll start turning up in new designs in another week or so.

In other productivity news, here are a couple of things that will be posting in tomorrow's shop updates.

i made it.

2011-01-31T13:59:00.002-06:00

And I LOVE it. This was a special request for a friend to give another friend as a Christmas gift.

hello, 2011.

2011-01-20T14:16:00.007-06:00

What's that you say? The party is over? The leftovers are all eaten, and the house is clean? I was certain the invite said "Begin the new year fresh, January 20!"

Oh, my friends. I had such blogging plans for this week. It's exam week at Anytown High, a traditionally easy week sandwiched between two long weekends. Perfect for Achieving Things. He

re's what I achieved: bronchitis. I nailed it, too, thank you very much. I Achieved Bronchitis like a champ. Of course, that meant that all my other plans fell by the wayside while I huddled in bed and called Leslie to bring me sick person supplies (while she felt lousy herself, so she gets champion points). So the several charming and informative blog posts I had planned are hereby shortened to this one list of (still informative) bullet points.

1. Leaves of Glass is 4 years old this week! I opened shop on January 16th, 2007. This year, I celebrated by moving most of the rest of my inventory to the new store on Big Cartel, and I'm having an anniversary sale there through Saturday, January 22nd

. Use the code 4MOREYEARS for 25% throughout the site.

2. I'm working on updating the design of my Lucite necklaces at urban legend to make them more durable. The original is quite sturdy for regular wear, but it won't stand up to tangles or toddlers, and I'd like it to do both. I've finally found a chain that's stronger but still slinky and flexible and narrow enoug

h to fit through the beads, and am testing a couple of designs with new chain and clamps. Look for them on new designs in the shop - all of my necklaces will eventually be made with the new chain, but I'm not going to be able to update all the photographs. Here's what the new stuff will look like:

3. New Year's Resolution: Do Not Buy Any Vintage Glass Beads For As Long As I Can Stand It. I know that sounds dire, but it's not as bad as it sounds. I have boxes and boxes of beads that I've never used, and the purpose of the resolution is twofold: a) I've been feeling stale in the design department, and usually I fix that by shopping. This time I'm going to try to jostle out of it by wrestling with what I have on hand and hoping that redirects my thinking. b) It will lessen the amount of stuff I have to move when I'm finally able to pull up stakes and head out of town. Which brings me to

4. My great project for this year is to prepare to move away from Chicago. Once the last of the bronchitis has disappeared, I'm going to start unpacking my storage space and selling stuff on eBay. This is the year for paring down. Selling it if I don't need it. Packing it for moving if I'm not going to need it for a while. Traveling to Portland to visit Shana and Shawn, and to see if it is indeed the right place for me. I'm writing this here and saying it out loud as much as I can so that I believe it's true, and I keep working like it's true.

5. Last but not least, sneak peeks. I'm trying not to put too much on my to-do list until I'm completely healthy, but starting next week there will be some new designs up in both shops. I wish you a happy and healthy and seriously belated New Year; enjoy the eye candy!

hunting for truffles.

2011-01-06T08:18:00.004-06:00

I mentioned that I raided the family photo collection while I was visiting my grandparents in Richmond. I only got through about 10% of it, and even that took me most of a day. The box I dug through was loose pictures from no particular era, and I found treasures ranging from an exquisite daguerreotype in a little blue velvet case("Darling Mother, 1856" - Grandma had no idea who it was, or even which side of the family it came from) to a Christmas card from 1991 featuring an elderly family friend sitting on Santa's lap and smiling the happiest, most ridiculous smile ever. It was a pretty good day.

There was one treasure that stood out from the rest. About two thirds of the way through the box, I found this beauty and pulled it out and waved it around and said "See? See? THIS is why I snoop!" Grandma let me keep this one, and I'm in love with it.

This is my grandparents in 1939, the year before they were married. I found a lot of good stuff, but this was the prize, and well worth spending a day in the dust. More pictures still to come - stay tuned for scandalous Great Aunt Virginia!

people are clever.

2011-01-05T12:00:00.003-06:00

A friend of mine tweeted this wonderful short film this morning, and I thought of so many people who would enjoy it that I'm taking a short cut and just posting it here. (If it doesn't display correctly, I apologize - click the link above and watch it on YouTube.)

i raided grandma's photo stash.

2011-01-04T21:08:00.002-06:00

These are me, age 3. Lots more to follow, eventually. My plan is to set up a flickr account just for family history. If I start now and add a few things at a time, it will be totally manageable. Window 4 now accepting bets on the likelihood of that.

give it forward.

2010-12-01T19:49:00.005-06:00

I'm a proud member of Cosa Verde. This beautiful website is a gathering place for artists and crafters who use recycled or repurposed materials, or who use green business practices. Last year, they started a charming tradition called Give It Forward for the holiday season. I joined Cosa Verde several months ago, so I'm very pleased to participate in this event this season. They explain it better than I could, so I'm posting their press release below. My joie de vivre necklace, pictured above, will be listed for Give It Forward on Friday, December 3. If the spirit moves you, please participate and nominate a recipient, either for my necklace, or for any of the other beautiful donations that will be showcased today through December 10.

Bringing a sustainable side to holiday shopping, cosa verde is celebrating the season with a special kind of holiday giveaway: visitors to the website are invited to enter to win handmade gifts not for themselves, but for someone in their lives who deserves a special surprise.

This is the second year of cosa verde’s Give it Forward giveaway. Last year over thirty artists participated, ultimately sending their handmade work out to recipients in all sorts of situations—good and bad. People who had just lost a job or a home, and people who had always been there for the entrants; newlyweds and chemo patients—the stories collected in the contest entries were truly heartwarming as people celebrated their loved ones. Several of our artists were so moved by last year’s contest that they jumped at the opportunity to participate again.

This year we are calling Give it Forward the “Ten Days of Nice.” For the first ten days of December, one to two handmade gifts will be posted to our blog, with comments open for contest entry. Gifts include handmade jewelry, clothing, homegoods and accessories, and range in value from $20 to $55. Visitors to the blog are invited to comment on why their loved one deserves a special gift this year; winners will be chosen at random from eligible entries. Entries will be accepted for seven days after each post goes up, with the final entries accepted December 17. Follow cosa verde on Twitter (@cosaverde) or Facebook for updates when new gifts are posted.

cosa verde is an online showcase where independent artisans and craftspeople from around the world promote their environmentally-friendly wares and connect directly with environmentally-conscious consumers.

clever girl.

2010-11-12T20:04:00.003-06:00

Ms. Cookoorikoo has a lot of wonderful ideas. I especially like this bracelet, brand new today:

to write love on her arms.

2010-11-12T09:00:00.001-06:00

Earlier this week I got a message from Rachel of Get Ready Set Go, inviting me to participate in a campaign to raise awareness of a movement called To Write Love on Her Arms Day. "To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery." You can read more about it here.

Rachel's idea was to gather as many Etsy sellers as possible and ask them to make a treasury (Etsy's curated guides) on this theme. The response was overwhelming, and you can see the results here. Each collection is a powerful reminder to see the people around you who are struggling, and to know that healing is possible. Someone you know is depressed. Someone you know self-injures. Someone you know struggles with addiction or despair. If you become the custodian of their story, embrace it and treat them with kindness and respect. Celebrate their healing.

If you need help, you can find it here:

National Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-TALK
Self Injury Hotline (SAFE) 1-800-DONTCUT
Alcoholics Anonymous (find a meeting here)

Please tell your story, and listen if someone you know needs to tell theirs.

serving two masters.

2010-11-05T13:35:00.003-05:00

Traditionally it can't be done, but I'm stubborn.

I have a small business that I need for my personal joy, and a full time job that I need because it pays for things. I'm also single, so everything that happens in my life is done by me - taking out the garbage, cooking dinner, answering email, designing the next crazy asymmetrical pair of earrings, remembering to order tissue paper, picking up prescriptions - whatever it is, I do it. (Except for driving to work. Sometimes Leslie does that. It makes a nice break, and sometimes I read to her in the car. Or making Saturday dinner. Shawn & Shana do that.) So I often run into situations where I have to serve two masters simultaneously, or drop the ball on something. Today, for instance. There was a storm last night, and along with a lot of very cold rain there was a strong wind and some biggish hail. When I got home, I found that my cable was out - internet & TV, thank you very much. The day before a weekend. When I had thought it might be nice to do a sale. I also have some new pieces I wanted to put up for sneak peek posts. The cable was still out when I got up this morning, so I grabbed my camera and several pieces on the way out the door.

It's been kind of a hectic week at work, and I had a deadline for this afternoon. I spent the morning doing the job-work (as a side project, I also spent a lot of time explaining to people that the chocolate cake on the counter behind me wasn't in celebration of anything - Steve brought it in because he likes cake and thought we might, too. It's surprisingly difficult to get people to embrace occasion-less cake). I met my deadline and emptied my inbox. I then spent my lunch break taking pictures. I'm now spending what should be work hours blogging and editing said pictures, in the hope that some of them are kinda pretty. And I'm answering work email and trying to anticipate anything I might need to address over the weekend, since I may not be able to get online for a day or so. I'm fortunate that my employers are very tolerant of my side projects, as long as I do what they actually pay me for.

****************************

...and now I've edited as best I can, and the sneak peeks are here. Really, of course, this post is a lengthy and roundabout excuse for why these pictures are not all that great. But the beads are extra cool, especially the red cotton ones. Look for these and other new designs soon, and have a peaceful and happy weekend. Two days with just one master, in my case.

kaitlyn, part 5: DIY, the extreme edition

2010-11-05T10:59:00.001-05:00

Got up Early today. Actually walking out of my hotel at 6:45am. Spare me all your tales of how early the rest of you get up to work your normal person hours, I haven’t seen 6:45am this many days in a row since I was last diving in a foreign country. On the other hand, I haven’t been to bed at 9pm this many days in a row since grade school. So I guess it evens out.

Playa isn’t in high season right now and they don’t really cater to divers who get up that early so I discovered it’s almost impossible to get a cup of coffee at that hour. Not good. As an aside, while I’ve enjoyed Playa I probably wouldn’t come back except to dive. I prefer my third world beach towns to have about 50% more ragged broke backpackers because then there will be about 300% more coffee shops, used book stores and breakfast places where you can order one banana pancake. In short I need a little more color and enthusiasm and a little less bleached blond hair over prada sunglasses and a disdainful expression.

But the cenotes were worth the whole trip. And I like Mexico, overall. It’s fun to be somewhere non-stateside where I understand the language and have some idea of the culture.

Anyway, I took a ferry across the bay to dive Cozumel. It’s a legendary dive spot, so I’m not sure what I expected but I thought it would be a nice finish to this trip. The diving’s nice. Pretty reefs, much better than the diving in Playa. But the bottom line is that I really prefer a little excitement and adventure in my diving/life so I prefer wreck and cave diving and the sighting of giant creatures to pretty reefs that look like giant aquariums. When I’ve seen my 12^th angel fish I tend to tune out and hope a shark swims by. It did get me thinking about the kind of environment I want for my dive master certification but that can be a subject for another post because this one is about Sergio. I mean, now it is. Starting… now.

Sergio is the craggy Mexican divemaster in his late 60’s running a sketchy little dive operation out of Cozumel, the kind with broken cement stairs leading down to the boat and equipment that looks like it’s survived WWII. We won’t get into safety concerns because it’s scary and there’s no one regulating that kind of thing but suffice it to say that shops like his are the main reason I feel I should own my own gear. Heaven knows who was last in all this stuff and how (if) it was cleaned. Anyway… That’s the part we’re not getting into cuz we’re talking about Sergio.

We get on the boat and head out to parts unknown where I’m always hoping there might actually be dragons and about 10 minutes in, Sergio pulls out his camera.

Garth and TJ, this part is for you.

Sergio has a pretty Canon camera in a housing that he made himself out of a discarded aluminum air tank. He cut off about 8” at the top curved part, sliced off the air output to make it flat and then he created an epoxy mold and poured himself a polycarbonite lens for the front of the housing. He welded handles to the side and mounted dive flashlights on top of them (probably attached with zip ties cuz I know he used grocery store bags and rubber bands around the lights to diffuse them). The back opening looks like something taken from one of those clear glass pasta jars with the lids that lock down with metal hooks (and probably was) and inside underneath the camera he stuck a panty liner to cushion the camera and absorb any water and humidity.

I have pictures, don’t worry.

It’s the most brilliant, cool looking homemade housing I’ve ever seen. And it’s orange. I almost asked him to make me one.

After I ask him all these questions and take a bunch of pictures (Kaitlyn, are you a cop??), he gets into all kinds of other stories. I’ll condense for you. Sergio got a mechanical engineering degree in France and spent several years in various engineering fields before retiring to Mexico and opening a dive shop. This is apparently my week for diver engineers. In his spare time, he:

1. Has built his house with a cistern on the roof that collects rainwater. He filters it down through his house water systems – using it for bathing, washing dishes etc. The waste water filters down into his basement where it is segregated by the type of waste it contains and treated with enzymes to neutralize the organic materials and make it suitable for watering his garden. This keeps him completely off the city’s water grid and he says he never runs out of water. His next plan is solar panels to get him off the city’s electric grid.

2. For the past decade, he’s also catalogued the temperature of the ocean on a daily basis and graphed it out so he knows what the average temperature will be on any given day. Any abrupt departure from these temperatures mean he can predict hurricanes. He has also spent the last decade cataloguing coral growth in his dive spots and knows where it’s healthy and where it needs help.

When the city of Playa built a rainwater channel to dump it into the ocean, Sergio went to the mayor and told him he was an idiot for wasting all that water. The mayor wasn’t happy.

Sergio also spoke fluent English and German on the boat, making him fluent in at least 4 languages. When the world ends, I’ll be setting up a tent in the remains of his back yard and hoping he takes me with him.

Alternately, I hope he gets on Survivor cuz he’d go all the way to the finish line.

kaitlyn on vacation, part 4: diving the cenotes

2010-11-01T18:44:00.003-05:00

Before I post Kaitlyn's latest, some brief background (mainly for my dad's benefit). Kaitlyn is a wardrobe supervisor. I think maybe Dad thinks this is someone who tells frumps how to shape up. In fact, it means she has degrees and background in theatrical costume design, and now spends her working life with traveling Broadway shows. It's fascinating, and it suits her well. She's also very good at it. It's also very hard work, fast-paced and often packed into a crazy small space, so she spends her vacation doing things like this:

Dove the cenotes today. Magical. One of the best diving days of my short diving career. Imagine a cave system, one of the biggest underground river caverns on the planet stretching for hundreds of miles, all flooded with water as clear as glass that you can float through. Everywhere you look are fossilized shells embedded in the walls, giant stalagmites jutting up from the floor and piles of broken stalactites scattered all over the ground like the bones of an ancient creature. I literally forgot I was diving and felt more like I was floating through air. Want to look at the top of that stalactite? Done. Just drift on up. Want to look at the piles of stalactites on the ground and then visit the next cave? Done. Turn on your light and swim through the cave wall.

We surfaced in a cave where the bottom was all a pool of water and the dome of the cave stretched overhead about 15-20 feet in the center, like being underneath a giant rock bowl. It looked like something out of a jungle movie scene with ropes of vines hanging from the ceiling and one round hole in the very top emitting light and sun and some plants. I expected to see Indiana Jones poke his head into view and let the monkey scamper down one of those vines, perhaps followed by spears from angry natives.

Another cave was called Points of Light because the ceiling of the cave was pierced, also creating a pool inside a rock dome with sunlight lancing through the ceiling in round rays dancing all over the water. This cave is accessible to swimmers without dive gear but you have to know exactly where you are going to find the short swim through route. If you know where you are going, it’s about 10 feet and you can hold your breath until you surface. If you don’t know and you take the wrong route, it’s about 500 feet and your chances of making it are remote. And scary.

There was no animal life except for a few catfish in the outer pools so it was all about stuff. Boulders, giant rock formations, fossilized shells, stalagmites that looked like they belonged in Carlsbad Caverns, hundreds of stalactites all over the ceilings and long cavernous swim throughs. LOVED it. Actually made me consider coming back to certify in cave diving so I know better what I’m doing.

Dove with 2 guys from Canada – Dave and Dorian -who seemed like young former frat boys who had graduated college and gone on to lucrative careers with plenty of money to buy expensive gear and fund their playboy attitudes. Nice enough but perhaps slightly entitled? On the way home, Dorian started teasing that they would have come to Mexico earlier in the month but Dave was a bit tied up.

Dorian: what kind of trouble was that exactly, Dave?

Dave: mmmbmbmm

Dorian: Hm, didn’t quite hear that. Jail, you say?

Dave: *silence*

Dorian: for 4 days? Wow. Must have been bad. What was it for exactly?

Dave (giving in): marijuana

Dorian: How many plants? 2000 I heard?

Dave (with a big sigh): 2100 actually. But technically they weren’t mine since I’d just sold the place.

Turns out our friend to the north, Dave, has been making quite the living as a pot grower for the last decade or so and just sold a “start up operation” grow house consisting of an old barn and 2100 plants when he was busted by the cops. He said it was far from his biggest grow house (“me and one other guy managed 8000 plants at one point”) and even though Canada has lenient drug laws, they “wanted to make an example” of him so they arrested him and he sat in jail for 4 days. But he’s convinced he’ll beat it and his girlfriend Karen, a legal assistant (conveniently), interjects with “Pot should be legal. I mean, what’s the big deal.” I agreed but said that since it is illegal, that makes the legal situation a bit tricky, right? That caused a moment of silence in the back seat followed by Dave saying “Kaitlyn, are you a cop?”

No Dave, not a cop. Just following an interesting story and living in an episode of Weeds, apparently.

kaitlyn on vacation, part 3: diving and Seriously Frank

2010-10-30T11:40:00.001-05:00

Met a guy today who is a retired engineer. Steve worked for, built up and partially still owns a company where he designed a machine that purifies water. Not the domestic kind you attach to your sink, the industrial kind that cleans oil out of the Gulf of Mexico. He says the machines are expensive – uh, yes, I imagine so – and previous to the oil spill they didn’t sell well. Until BP bought 200,000 of them.

Now he owns a dive shop in Playa – the Geofish – where he hangs out when he’s not gallivanting around the world, diving and figuring out what he wants to do next. His sons – Morgan and Maxden - run the shop. Morgan’s also an engineer and Max has a degree in international business and they live between Playa and Colorado. All these guys are great, smart, friendly and good divers.

This morning I get to the shop and see the usual general mélange of international divers, a pair of boys from the Netherlands, an experienced diver, Frank, from Quebec and 2 newly certified older women, Dawn and Charlene, who are signing up for their 7^th dive. Frank has a massive dive knife strapped to his calf that reaches from his knee to his ankle so Dawn and Charlene, who have no gear whatsoever, ask him about it. He launches into this tale about a woman in his open water certification group many years ago who died because her gear tangled on some rocks and she panicked. She took her gear off and her regulator out of her mouth and tried to get away and she drowned.

Lovely, right?

Dawn and Charlene are getting paler as Frank goes on and on very seriously with no humor whatsoever about how this woman had a full tank of air but she panicked and couldn’t cut herself free because she wasn’t carrying a knife like this (cue the giant knife that he draws dramatically from the sheath) as the girls clutch each other and back up slightly until Max steps in between them and says “Seriously Frank? Stop scaring the ladies.” And herds them away.

Minutes later we’re getting the dive briefing and someone asks if we’ll see sharks. I had emailed the same question and Max told them what he told me, that bull sharks have been sighted in one of the dive sites because a huge school of mullet is passing through this area. Frank pipes up “Bull sharks? Did you know that bull sharks are responsible for 90% of all shark attacks on humans?” The girls, predictably, gasp as they reconsider whether this is their day for diving and Max just shakes his head and says “Seriously, Frank? Shut up.”

All of us and Seriously Frank lug our stuff out to the boat, which is docked just off shore. The surf is all choppy and rough – possible backwash from Hurricane Richard? – and the boat is small but it's a short ride to the dive site. We get under the water for the first dive and Dawn and Charlene are like newborn horses, all floppy arms and legs and gear flying around. Good divers are very streamlined with smooth movements, these girls flailed all their limbs about, got turned helplessly upside down by the current, thunked onto the bottom of the ocean because they couldn’t control their buoyancy, tangled their hoses in their BCs and swam into everyone. Sometimes divers like that drive me mad but these two were trying so hard and just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. It was almost cute.

I’d be drifting along and see something race by out of the corner of my eye, and there’s Charlene caught in the current on her back waving her arms around as Morgan or Max tries to catch her before she runs into a shelf of corral and crushes 100 years worth of growth. Dawn couldn’t see well enough to read her air gauge so Charlene would paddle over to her, sometimes sideways, and try to read it for her. Adorable.

The two Dutch boys were similarly crazy divers but fortunately, Seriously Frank was a good diver and I’m a decent diver so we just floated above the fray and tried to keep from getting kicked in the head. The first dive had nothing interesting but we’d been in the water 5 minutes on the second dive and we saw a big black seahorse (caballito del mar)! Morgan had commented that he liked my tattoo but we probably wouldn’t see one as they are rare in this part of Mexico so it was super cool to see one. At the end of the second dive it was only Morgan, the two Dutch boys and I as the others had gone a different route and all of a sudden we are swimming through a GIANT school of fish. Thousands and thousands of fish maybe 5-8” long whirling and zipping around us like colored streamers. I’ve never seen a school that big. And I immediately thought, these are the mullet Max talked about and the frantic agitated way they are moving must mean there’s a shark around here somewhere.

We had just finished our 3 minute safety stop when the mullet absorbed us and I knew there was no way we were leaving until we saw that shark. Sure enough, the school parted a few minutes later and there was the bull shark (Tiburon!) lazing his way along the bottom, 8 feet long, and giantly fat. I probably couldn’t put my arms around his middle, that’s how full of fish he was. We waved, he flicked his tail, we all did the geeky stuff divers do when they see something cool and then we came up and bragged about it on the boat to all the divers that didn’t see it.

Seriously Frank didn’t get to see the shark. He was disappointed.

guest post: kaitlyn's vacation, part 2

2010-10-29T14:43:00.002-05:00

Long day of travel yesterday ending in in Cancun last night where I immediately met Lauren, a cute Australian girl who was also waiting on the bus to Playa del Carmen. She’s a paramedic and where she lives they have a hyperbaric chamber and a diver emergency phone line so she fields a lot of interesting calls, like this call they got from kids on a boat freaking out after a shark attack. She said it was like something out of Jaws or a horror film. Crazy stuff. It was fascinating to talk to someone whose job is so different from mine.

We rode in to town together and then shlepped our luggage down the main road of Calle Quinta to find dinner at 10pm. Steak tacos and guacamole with a cold beer in an outdoor café while watching the international world of Playa walk by? Yes please. The weather is balmy and humid and perfect and my hotel had folded my towel into the shape of a swan, which brought back delightful memories of Guatemala.

I got nowhere near enough sleep so I could get up and go diving. The only problem with this pursuit is the freaking earliness of it all. And of course, my hotel doesn’t have internet access in my room so I’m sitting in a different outdoor café with an iced coffee and a chocolate muffin finishing this in a hurry. I know, I know, it’s rough.

More later.

guest post: kaitlyn's vacation, part 1

2010-10-28T19:56:00.002-05:00

My life is pretty interesting to me, but a lot of it doesn't make for very good storytelling. My friend Kaitlyn's life, however, is fascinating and she's a very good writer. She's a brave girl, and her adventures sometimes make for such good reading that she is periodically published on travel blogs. She's on vacation right now, and has been sending amazing emails about what she's doing. She gave me permission to cross-post some of them here so my readers can get an exciting break from my (pulse-pounding) posts about going to the flea market and finding the perfect strand of beads. Not that I'll stop telling you about that. You'd miss it. Here's her first installment:

Perfectly perfect day in San Diego on Monday.

Their Museum of Contemporary Art has a “Viva La Revolucion” exhibit showing street art installations by artists from a bunch of different countries. The art ranged from a painted brick wall with a face pecked out of the white paint to giant graffiti-like murals, plants growing out of a pile of found objects including a mobile of empty bottles, a stop motion animation film taken from drawings on public walls and buildings, works by Banksy and Shepherd Fairey and lots of people I’d never heard of. Gorgeous, riveting, thought provoking; everything art should be.

However, my favorite part was the education room where the walls were covered with paper made to look like a stone wall and you could react to the exhibit by “tagging” the wall. One person reacted by writing a simple treatise about how graffiti is a way for homeless youth to express their artistic natures but it costs the city money that should be spent getting kids off the street and so graffiti is a waste of money and kids should tag their houses, not the public walls. (Logically, of course, homeless youth clearly don’t have houses to tag; but no matter…). It’s funny enough that someone graffitied a fake stone wall to protest graffiti but then two other people took offense to this reaction and wrote “boring” and “narrow viewpoint” on it.

They graffitied an anti-graffiti reaction in an art installation glorifying graffiti.

Dude, that’s hilarious.

awareness vs. aggression

2010-10-26T11:31:00.004-05:00

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The school where I work designated Monday, October 25th as Wear Pink day. Signs went up everywhere to wear pink on Monday; pink tshirts with the school's name and the slogan "Real [Warriors*] Wear Pink" were sold as a fundraiser.

I consider breast cancer awareness and research to be 100% worthy causes, and have participated in these days several times in the past. This year, however, I didn't. I didn't plan to avoid it - I just didn't think about it when I left the house. I don't own any pink clothes, and nobody in the building had pink ribbons this year. I didn't have enough cash on me for a t-shirt. I also didn't think this was in any way a failure on my part - I donate in a number of ways to a number of different causes that are important to me, breast cancer and the American Cancer Society among them.

However. In the last 24 hours, no less than 5 women have confronted me about my lack of pink yesterday. The first was in the bathroom yesterday morning. A woman I've never talked to before looked at me in the mirror and said, "What a day for your hair not to be pink." (For anyone unfamiliar with my hair, it's currently several shades of purple in various stages of fade.) And then she walked out. By the time I got the fifth comment today - "You disappoint me! We got to get you pink!" - I was already writing this post in my head.

This is bullying, plain and simple. Mean Girl mentality is insidious and it's certainly everywhere in a high school, but it breaks my heart to see grown women embracing it in the name of charity. It's just a pink shirt; it doesn't mean I don't respect the battle or the loss or the risk it represents. The goal of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is to raise consciousness, raise money, encourage women to get regular mammograms and practice prevention measures, and dare I say it, honor our individual loved ones. It's not just to paint the town pink. Everybody remembers, celebrates, grieves and takes action in their own way - that's how activism takes on meaning and effects change. It disturbs me that an effort intended to unite people in the saving of lives has taken on a facile mob-marketing mentality (see the Facebook "I Like It..." fiasco, for example). When I started thinking about this, I began considering the overall approach of the Wear Pink day this year. Posters went up about a week ago with the date and the message to wear pink!; the photograph on the poster was a group of 5 teenage girls, 4 of them wearing coordinating pink clothing. Look closer, and what is this picture actually from? It's Mean Girls. The 5th girl is Lindsay Lohan, off to the side by herself. No pink. Then take the fundraising t-shirts: "Real [Warriors] Wear Pink." Again, instead of taking the opportunity to deliver a concrete message for action, it's a subtly aggressive message of team loyalty.

By all means, we should wear pink if we want to and donate what we can and participate in runs to honor and celebrate our loved ones. And everyone should please, please get a mammogram. Effective activism, like beautiful women, comes in all shapes and sizes and colors. Be respectful, and don't judge a person's involvement based on what color they're wearing.

*Not our actual team name, but you get the idea.

a good night's work.

2010-10-24T17:08:00.002-05:00

Shana and I are working on more of the silk and vintage glass pod earrings we debuted last week. On Saturday night, I took several more batches of beads over and she put together three new pairs. We think they're lovely. These will be listed at Leaves of Glass in the next day or so.

sometimes poem

2010-10-20T13:41:00.001-05:00

Ode to American English

I was missing English one day, American, really,
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything
from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought at Brentano's on the Avenue de l'Opera
is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English
know their dahlias, but what about doowop, donuts,
Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian
accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,
hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S. of A.,
the fragmented fandango of Dagwood's everyday flattening
of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating
on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking
the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,
Ebonics, Spanglish, "you know" used as comma and period,
the inability of 90% of the population to get the past perfect:
I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,
the battle cry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
"Dude, wake up," and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy, "Whoa, I was toasted." Yes, ma'am,
I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy,
rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering,
shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous
back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut
flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters
Sylvester the Cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators
of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird
resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent
of utter unhappiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist
euphoric stew, the junk mail, voice mail vernacular.
On every boulevard and rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny
Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johnny B. Goode,
and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue,
finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble,
Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all,
sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne
verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping
in my head like Corvettes on Dexadrine, French verbs
slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.

by Barbara Hamby, taken from Good Poems for Hard Times (ed. Garrison Keillor)

here be chaos.

2010-10-18T11:43:00.004-05:00

It has long been my plan to have an orderly process wherein I make new things, take photographs in batches, promote through the use of blogging and sneak peeks and then list the new items in my shop(s). This is a perfectly reasonable plan, and would, I feel, work out well. Stuff keeps getting in the way of my reasonable plan, though - namely my actual job that I get paid to do. It's shameless, really, the way this actual job interferes with my reasonable plan.

All of which is to say that once again I have sneak peeks mere hours before my shop update, which is almost pointless. Still, here they are. I've been lucky to find some spectacular rare beads lately, and they'll be turning up in new pieces starting this week. Cotton pearls in shiny green turquoise; glass spiderweb beads in black and red; and carved Lucite treasures I've never used before.

Because my time at the office is so chaotic at the moment, I'm also planning to list things in my new Leaves of Glass shop throughout the week (instead of just on Tuesdays) to lessen the urgency of preparing several listings at once. Updates for urban legend will remain on Tuesday for the time being.

This week is also the launch for a collaborative project that I've been working on with Shana of cookoorikoo (keep an eye on her blog for more details, and spot one of the collaboration pieces below!).

70

2010-10-15T17:01:00.003-05:00

My darling grandparents (my dad's parents) celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago. While we were all in Idaho for Faith's wedding, Dad showed us this celebration ad he put together for their local newspaper. I'd never seen this photograph before, and I love it. Isn't Grandma beautiful?

new things: a list

2010-10-12T13:37:00.005-05:00

(fetching picture of my niece & nephew by their mom, my talented sis-in-law, Abby)

In the downtime between going to Faith's wedding, and getting pictures to post from Faith's wedding, I offer you a list of things I saw last weekend that I've never seen before:

1. My niece Calli
2. Mount Rainier
3. A magpie in flight
4. My new brother-in-law
5. The guy in the seat next to me taking off his shirt mid-flight to change into something cooler
6. The Space Needle
7. A truly huge albino rabbit
8. A tall and narrow man in pleat-front khakis and a saffron orange sweater belting out Hit Me Baby One More Time
9. A hand-fastening ritual
10. A four year old really, really, REALLY excited about ottomans

short story

2010-10-11T14:35:00.003-05:00

I have a new neighbor. The new neighbor has a cello. He's forever playing jazz riffs on his cello, so the soundtrack of home is like living in a cat and mouse cartoon. Pluck, pluck. Sneak, sneak. Pounce.

sometimes the internet is magic.

2010-10-04T15:25:00.003-05:00

Like when you're looking for inspiration for colors for an embroidery project you're doing, and you find this:

via Flickr

I wish I had one hanging in my living room. I'm pretty sure it would tie the whole room together.

early bird

2010-10-04T10:32:00.005-05:00

I'm making a conscious effort to get a little ahead of myself so that my weekends aren't so jam-packed with to-do list things. So I spent some time this weekend pulling beads together for holiday designs. Most of them won't be in the shop for a while yet, but it felt cozy to be enjoying crisp, cool weather and gathering up sparkling silvers and whites for winter wear.

Here's a preview of what will be in the shop tomorrow, though - I played all weekend in the beadyard, so there will be several new earring designs and two new necklaces this week.

(Keep an eye on Leaves of Glass, too - there are several new pieces that will list there tomorrow as well.)

a new leaf

2010-09-27T10:25:00.005-05:00

It's been a very long time since I've posted anything here. During the silent months, I've enjoyed a hilarious and productive summer vacation, gotten rid of what feels like half my stuff, rearranged my apartment, started a regular workout routine, redyed my hair three times (it's blue right now), read many books, designed lots and lots of new work, and made a perfect mulligatawny soup. And three failed batches of caramel.

A lot of this has been chronicled on Twitter. I find it easier to keep up with that, for some reason, although it obviously doesn't have the scope for reflection that blogging does. If you do the Twitter thing, please follow me - I promise hilarity and frequent hair updates, as well as immediate notification when I post new things and the occasional random sale, based on whimsy. I have renewed intentions for good blogging, of course - when do I not? - and a head full of half-written blog posts on everything from concert reviews to dyeing Lucite beads, and I hope to actually be able to write about them soon.

Anyone who already follows me on Twitter will know that I've been working on setting up a new shop over at Big Cartel. As of this week, I'll start posting my new designs for Leaves of Glass in that shop rather than my Etsy shop for Tuesday updates. (For now, urban legend will remain on Etsy only). I'll continue to sell existing listings and several of my best sellers on Etsy, but will be working on promoting the new site as much as I can. There are a number of reasons for this, but I'll just touch on my top 2 here:

1. It's more cost effective for me, and therefore I can make my jewelry a bit more affordable for you. You'll notice that prices are a little lower there than in my Etsy shop.

2. DISCOUNT CODES! Big Cartel allows me to program discount codes into my shop so that you can take advantage of sales, coupons and special offers without waiting for a revised invoice or refund.

This is a huge deal for me, and I'm excited to try it out; so to celebrate point #2, I'll be launching this week's brand new Leaves of Glass shop update with a discount code. Enter code NEWLEAF when you checkout at www.leaves-of-glass.com for a 10% discount on your order. (Fine Print: This code will be good through Tuesday, October 5, and may not be combined with other discounts.)

I'll also be sending out an email reminder with the new shop information. In the meantime, here are a few sneak peeks of tomorrow's update to whet your appetite.

really?

2010-09-13T13:46:00.001-05:00

I haven't posted anything since July? How about that.

sometimes poem (formerly known as weekly poem)

2010-07-29T02:17:00.003-05:00

Vermeer

Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded window, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat's cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.

If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold . . .
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.

by Howard Nemerov

posted, with love, for Kerry

summer sale times at urban legend! (and a slight amendment to the shop update)

2010-07-26T21:05:00.002-05:00

The time for summer sale at urban legend has arrived! From Wednesday, July 28-Monday, August 2 I'll be having a 20% off sale in my urban legend Etsy shop. (Everything is on sale, with the exception of the Heavy Fuel designs - see my previous post for more information about that.)

Sale prices will be listed, so there's no need to wait for a revised invoice. However, because sales involve So. Much. Editing. of listings, I've decided to wait until Wednesday morning to post my new shop update items for this week. That saves me listing them tomorrow and then having to edit them right away on Wednesday morning. I'm a little selfish that way. But here's a little peek at what I'll have for you on Wednesday. New items and sale prices will appear early Wednesday morning ~ have fun, and thanks for supporting urban legend!

heavy, heavy fuel.

2010-07-25T16:58:00.005-05:00

The wonderful glasfaden recently put one of my Heavy Fuel necklaces in an Etsy treasury devoted to Gulf Coast cleanup. Most of the sellers she featured are donating a portion of their sales from their shops or specific items to Gulf restoration. I'm ashamed to say it hadn't occurred to me to do that with this particular design, and I just ended up in her list because of the title of my item. (It was originally named for the excellent song by Dire Straits.)

However, it struck me as a perfect opportunity to draw continued attention to the damage that BP's catastrophic oil spill is causing to the beautiful and economically critical Gulf Coast area. There is so much work to be done, and my kind friend Keri in New Orleans recommended some good organizations to me - the kind that use more of their money for work and less for PR, and that target specific efforts. If you'd like to donate directly, or volunteer, you can find more information at any of these websites:

http://www.saveourwetlands.org
http://www.matteroftrust.org
http://www.healthygulf.org/

With that in mind, I spent a lot of this past weekend creating new Heavy Fuel designs for urban legend. The Heavy Fuel designs are made with metalized vintage Lucite beads and vintage chain. They look substantial and bulky, but because the finish is metal plated over a Lucite base, they're very lightweight and comfortable to wear. Most of these designs are one of a kind (some of the earrings are not one of a kind and can be made again); 100% of the sale of each piece will be donated to Gulf Coast Restoration Network.

The necklace is already listed in my shop; the other pieces will be listed in my shop tomorrow morning, along with several other new items in my weekly shop update. As these sell, I'll be adding more Heavy Fuel pieces to continue the fundraising effort.

And here's a little extra piece of news: I will be starting my summer sale at urban legend on Wednesday of this week. All items in my shop, with the exception of the Heavy Fuel pieces, will be 20% off from Wednesday, July 28 - Monday, August 2. The fundraising pieces will remain at full price.

love bites, part 3

2010-07-15T13:09:00.004-05:00

And here's how it all came together:

After spending about a week communing with Lola's teeth and my bead boxes, I decided to make a sort of harness out of sterling wire that would cradle the teeth securely, but wouldn't change their structural integrity at all. I played around with shapes and wound up with this:

This is basically the same as the vintage lampwork glass leaves and flowers that I love so much - tooth flowers. When I had the final versions all wired up and ready to use, I put them in a tiny vase for pictures. This is my favorite photograph that I took during the entire project:

For the final earring design, I wanted to do something that definitely looked like my work. Since my work lately focuses heavily on asymmetry, I opted to make a mismatched pair of earrings but kept them a bit shorter than the crazy long asymmetrical pairs I've designed in recent months. The beads I chose are classic and elegant - some of the rarest and oldest things in my collection - but have a decidedly Gothic flavor when assembled with dark metals (and teeth).

Here is the end result, the Love Bites earrings:

And a little chart of the pieces I used to make them:

I'm really pleased with the way they turned out. It was a pleasure to make something special for someone whose joy, generous spirit and hard work (really, crazy hard work - I secretly suspect her of having bargained for extra hours in the day) I admire so much. Thanks for the teeth, Lorraine! I loved having them in my company, and they'll be on their way back to you soon. I hope you love them!

love bites, part 2

2010-07-14T15:53:00.006-05:00

Here's what happened next:

I freaked out a little bit. I mean, I got the shouty spinnies. "You got me Neil Gaiman's dog's teeth to make earrings with? For the Fabulous Lorraine to actually wear?! This is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me!" (My strict grammar training deserts me in high-tension situations.) And then I did a Cordelia: "Excuse me. I have to call everyone I have ever met, right now."

When I calmed down, I started to freak out in a quieter, more worrisome way. It's a fun and amazing prospect to think of making earrings with something really special for someone you don't know but really admire, but then it hit me that I'd be using unique, irreplaceable, very very sentimental materials. The baby teeth of someone's beloved pet - it doesn't matter whose pet it is, that's a very special thing to do. (Weird, I know, Dad - just try to be happy for me...) I want to make something lovely and lasting and unique, that she'll love but that also looks like I definitely made it. So I got to continue with that quiet, daunting freakout while I waited for the teeth to arrive, all the while debating what to do with them.

My first thought was to set them in silver (with help from some metalsmithing friends) and do something simple but striking. Then they arrived, though, and I saw immediately that wasn't going to work. Here are Lola's elegant and dainty teeth:

They're about a half inch long and a little less than a half inch high at the tallest point, and they're very, very thin. I was sure that doing any metalwork with them would dry them to the point of making them brittle, and might actually crack them. Drilling them for hanging was also obviously out of the question. I spent the next week staring at them and taking some pictures, while I debated how I might use them and what beads I'd like to use.

Tune in tomorrow for the results.

purple fire

2010-07-13T16:13:00.002-05:00

I had extra awesome hair this morning.

love bites, part 1: a tooth tale

2010-07-13T13:56:00.004-05:00

photo of Lola by @neilhimself via Twitter

Here's what happened:

The phone rang, and I answered it. It was Shana. You can find out what she said here: http://shanasays.typepad.com/shanasays/2010/07/this-odd-thing-i-did.html

Tune in tomorrow for another toothsome installment!

in the sandbox this week

2010-07-10T15:14:00.003-05:00

These are some of the beads and colors I'm playing with right now. Look for these in Tuesday's shop update at urban legend!

summer lazy

2010-07-02T20:19:00.006-05:00

image from flickr

I'm enjoying my summer so much. I've gone to movies, gone to breakfast, gone to dinner, gone for drinks, gone on a makeup-buying bender, gone for walks, gone to block parties, and gone days and days without washing my hair. Ahem.

In the spirit of my lazy summer days, there will be no shop updates for either of my shops the week of July 5. I'm taking a break from photographs and listings, although I'll still be making new things. You just have to wait an extra week to see them while I sit and read a book. (I know. Big meanie.)

I will, however, continue my summer sale in Leaves of Glass through Monday, July 5. Everything in that shop is 30% off, with sale prices marked so you don't have to fidget waiting for me to get around to sending a revised invoice (that would take way too long. I'm quilting, or at the farmer's market, or trying to figure out how to make yogurt or something). Many of these pieces will be discontinued after this sale, so get them while you can! I'll be working on a new collection later this summer (I'd give you a hint, but I have absolutely no idea what it's going to be like), so I'm clearing the decks now. Here are a few of the pieces that are currently on sale:

I hope you're enjoying your summer too! If you read any really great books, drop me a line and tell me about them.

sneak peek june 14, 2010

2010-06-14T14:19:00.002-05:00

I promised Pellet he could go to Milwaukee with me, but in my hurry to reach the beads I forgot him. As a consolation prize, I let him dive in and play around when I got home. Here are some pictures of him enjoying himself in the bucket o' beads.

Tuesday's shop update will be mostly for urban legend. I brought home some amazing vintage Lucite. A number of the pieces I bought are vintage Lucite pendants that are not available online from my suppliers yet, so most of the earrings I'm listing tomorrow are one of a kind (for now, anyway) - get them while you can, these are some really special beads!

the haul

2010-06-13T22:05:00.003-05:00

My friends, I bought beads. Lots and lots and lots of beads. My Friday was spent wandering the aisles at the Bead & Button Show in Milwaukee. Shana came up and met me in the late afternoon, witnessing my lunacy and carrying my stash when it got so heavy that I became delirious. My truffle hunt at long last exhausted, we went to Comet Cafe and had drinks and dinner. I spread the haul out on the table and sat brooding over it, drumming my fingertips together a la Mr. Burns (Shana's Amazing Technicolor Dream picture above for proof). I've spent several hours today making new vintage Lucite pieces for urban legend, and hope to make a few more tomorrow. The picture above is your pre-sneak-peek - there will be more photographs tomorrow afternoon to whet your appetite for Tuesday's shop update. Sleep sweetly, and dream of candy-colored beads.

please stand by...

2010-06-01T19:20:00.003-05:00

The shop update experienced some technical difficulties today. First all the photos I took yesterday were too dark and had to be reshot. Then my home computer - dear, ancient home computer - struggled and doddered and resisted all through the editing and listing process. But I have triumphed! There are new plastic delights in urban legend! There's no update for Leaves of Glass this week - I've been concentrating on refreshing urban legend - but there will be new items for Leaves next week.

sneak peek!

2010-05-24T13:35:00.002-05:00

I'm not doing so well with the sneak peeks for my shop updates - ideally, they should be spread out over several days leading up to the update, but at the moment it's all I can do to get the update posted at all. I have high hopes for improving my technique once school is out, however. Bear with me...

Tomorrow's update will be for both urban legend and Leaves of Glass. I've finally made some new vintage Lucite pieces for urban legend, and you can see some of them in the picture above. There are several more, including some earrings and an updated version of my long-ago popular Combat Bracelet.

The Leaves of Glass update will be quite a bit smaller: just five pieces this week, including two one-of-a-kind coordinating pieces that showcase some gorgeous rare glass beads in bright eggyolk yellow.

I'm still working on editing photographs, and have a few more that I'm hoping to take this afternoon before it gets dark. I'll do my best to have the update live before 11 a.m. Central Daylight Time on Tuesday, May 25.

where's my lost shaker of salt?

2010-05-19T12:20:00.005-05:00

Sigh. Austin was sultry perfection in every way and I'm having serious withdrawal pangs. The weather was beautiful, the city was fun and low key and welcoming, and chock full of good food and good music and good antiques and books and ice cream and boots and other people with hair that's silly like mine. I was fortunate to travel-and-Renegade with a group of talented, smart, easygoing and dry-witted friends - I highly recommend this if you're going anywhere. I recommend my specific people, actually. I've booked them for my next trip already, but maybe you'll be lucky and they'll take you somewhere after that.

In addition to traveling on the buddy system, I also got to see my sister and her husband, who drove down from Arkansas to go to Renegade, see me and visit some friends. And then it turned out that someone I grew up with also lives there now, and I ran into him. All roads, it seems, lead to Austin.

My camera was doing a weird thing all weekend and seems to have disappeared a number of my pictures. The ones I have are mostly from the antique mall that Shana and I decimated on Friday, and from Saturday evening while we were waiting for the bats. (Yes, bats. More batnews later. Stay tuned to the same batchannel.) In the meantime, here are some of the survivors, and I'll have a few more posted on flickr in a couple of days.

Bethany & Ethan (formally known as Chuckles & Mr. Chuckles,
as indicated on their marriage license...)

Kathy & Nancy

Donovan

Shana found something frightening at the antique mall...

...and here it is.

p.s.

2010-05-10T18:19:00.002-05:00

My last day of shipping for Etsy orders before I leave for Austin will be Wednesday, May 12. I'm leaving both my shops open while I'm away, but will have limited internet access - I'll reply to convos as I can, and any orders placed through Etsy between Thursday, May 13-Monday, May 17 will ship next Wednesday, May 19. Thanks for your patience!

five more days

2010-05-10T17:14:00.004-05:00

There are just five days to go until Renegade Austin, and it's finally set in that I'm actually doing this. Imminently. Any day now. I'm excited and exhausted and nervous and really, really looking forward to being there and having a great time and meeting a whole new group of wonderful people. I know this blog has been sadly silent for the last two months. Here's a little taste of what I've been doing.

Renegade To-Do List:

1. Buy plane ticket and make hotel reservations: check.
2. Make bracelets, necklaces, and @%#(&*! pairs of earrings: check.
3. Apply for Texas state license to collect sales tax: check.
4. Create packaging, displays and signs: check.
5. Do inventory. Ugh, counting: check.
6. Think about what to wear, and decide I need to buy all kinds of new things, shoes included: check.
7. Make sure credit card processing info is up to date: check.
8. Blog entire preparation process, complete with pictures: FAIL.
9. Borrow suitcase: check.
10: Thank friends profusely for driving all my stuff down to Austin: ongoing-check-in-progress.
11: HAVE HYSTERICS: check.
12: Repeat step 11: check.
13: Drop off drycleaning: check.
14: Get through the rest of the work week: to-do.
15: Pick up drycleaning: to-do.
16: Pack: to-do.
17: Get on plane: to-do.
18: Have amazing good times in Austin: to-do.

To my fellow Austin Renegades, I can't wait to meet you. I'll see you there!

Below: Pictures of my trial run-through of setup. My actual booth will have about twice as much space, so this is only half of it, but you get the idea. I don't have enough table space in my tiny apartment to actually set up the whole thing, so I'm just crossing my fingers that it looks good for the real deal.

countdown

2010-05-05T18:11:00.005-05:00

source

In the midst of preparing for Renegade Austin and wrapping up the school year at my day job, I realized this week that my Leaves of Glass shop is hurtling towards its 2,000th sale. Looking back on the last three years, I can't believe how much has changed, and the ways my life has been enriched by the opportunities I've had and the people I've met. I was chatting a couple of days ago with the customer who was my 1,000th sale, back in July of 2008 - it feels like that just happened. I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to do something I love this much. That I'm also able to share it with amazing customers and gifted fellow designers is icing on the cake.

To celebrate this milestone, I dreamed up a surprise package for the customer who will be my 2,000th sale. Lucky number 2000 will get to choose two pairs of earrings from my Leaves of Glass shop, and will also receive a surprise bonus - and my gratitude for sharing this mile marker with me!

Heartfelt thanks to my delightful customers - so many of you have become dear friends, as well. I would never be able to keep doing this without you, and you make it so much fun.

With grit, sparkle and affection, Kateri

sneak peeks and a retraction.

2010-05-04T16:08:00.006-05:00

With the gifts of some good light and a few extra hours for work, it turns out I'm able to post this week's shop update almost on time. New pieces will be going up at Leaves of Glass this evening. The part of the process that will suffer from this is sneak peeks ahead of time part. As soon as I've posted this, I'll start writing descriptions for the new items, so there will only be a lag of a couple of hours between peeks and listings.

Several of this week's pieces were inspired by a lilac bush that I saw blooming against a brick building. I loved the combination of creamy purple and rust red, so that's what I'm focusing on for your sneak-peeking pleasure. There will be several other pieces as well, but I'll let those be a surprise. (There's also a bracelet that will have to go live tomorrow, as I seem to have left the pictures on my computer at work - yet another in my small comedy of errors for the week.) The photographs at the top and bottom of this post are closeups of actual pieces I'll be listing, and the rest are some beautiful things I found on flickr that evoke the same feel.

Thanks for bearing with me during my week of crazy!

keep going, we're almost there.

2010-05-03T11:13:00.003-05:00

This is my last week to prepare for the Renegade Craft Fair in Austin. I think I have plenty of jewelry made, but I'm feeling the pinch on the technical/packing/planning list of things that remain to be done.

This week's shop update will be my last before the Austin trip, and I may not be able to do another one until the last week of May. So of course I'm not ready yet. The photographs I took yesterday did not, for the most part, turn out well. I forgot to photograph a couple of items. And I didn't do the hanging earring pictures. This morning I thought of one more thing I want to do. And so on and so on...

Rather than rush it and use photos I'm not happy about, I'm going to do my shop update on Friday this week instead of Tuesday. That will allow me to include any last-minute new things I think of this week, and give me a chance to reshoot the pictures without having to sacrifice something else. Like, say, doing the laundry or eating dinner.

So: one sneak peek, above, all red and sparkly. More to follow throughout the week as I work on it.

And as a consolation prize, here's a picture of my brand-new bright purple hair! (Arty fuzzy black edges added because it's a phone pic with my really messy apartment clearly visible in the background.) Now, back to the to-do list. See you on the other side...

peep show #3

2010-04-26T13:33:00.003-05:00

Here's your sneaky peek at the juicy colors and darkly sparkles for tomorrow's shop update:

peek.

2010-04-19T09:22:00.003-05:00

Sneak peak at some of the beads I used in the
designs for tomorrow's shop update.

i made this.

2010-04-19T08:24:00.005-05:00

Last fall I was really enjoying doing some needlework for Christmas gifts. I had big plans to take photographs of everything I did and do a whole blog post on them after the holidays. Needless to say, this did not happen. I took some pictures, which I promptly lost in the thicket of my electronic files. Some things weren't finished until after Christmas. Other things were never photographed.

I was editing a couple of pictures this morning, and found one of these pieces. This little photo find inspired me, so I did some digging and managed to come up with a few more of the photographs. It's not the fancy write-up I initially planned, but I had so much fun making these (and then giving them to their intended recipients) that I'm happy to have a small record of it. Such as it is, I present to you Needlefest '09 (primarily based on inside jokes, but I hope still fun to look at):

I made this for Shana's husband, Shawn. The quote is his own. :)

This was for Dennice's son, who loves both pie & squirrels. Naturally.

This portrait of Archy was made for Leslie, and is a two-part effort. Her boyfriend used an iPhone app to draw a Lennon-esque sketch of Archy, which she loved. I thought the simple lines had possibilities for embroidery, so I made a transfer and stitched it onto a vintage handkerchief.
Art by Chris & fiber interpretation by me.

This piece is also done on a vintage handkerchief, and was made for Skunkboy Creatures' craft swap a few months back.

tease.

2010-04-12T12:33:00.005-05:00

Lately I've been trying to do shop updates on Etsy all at once on Tuesday mornings, rather than listing one or two new things a day. It's been working out pretty well - I like having all the photo editing and description-writing done at once, and it means I don't have to worry about anything except relisting for the rest of the week. Which leaves me more time to actually make new things. (Imagine that!)

I thought it would be fun to start doing preview peeks of things that will be appearing in each week's shop updates - either by photographing a handful of beads that I've used in new items, or by showing little slivers of things in teaser photographs. I'm opting for Option B this week. Below are sneak peeks of 5 new things that I'll be listing tomorrow, both in urban legend and Leaves of Glass. Enjoy!

nature, red in tooth and claw

2010-03-19T09:44:00.003-05:00

I've been a little sidetracked lately, watching ms. birdie num nums here. Shana told me about this incredible live barn owl webcam. It sounded fascinating, so I googled it. It turns out that fascinating isn't nearly a large enough word to cover it.

Molly is a wild barn owl, currently waiting for her eggs to hatch in a cozy nest box. That's where the cozy ends. It's so amazing to watch this beautiful creature go about her wild life, completely unedited and unaware of observers. Yesterday morning I watched her eat a rabbit that her mate brought for her - the last we saw of the rabbit was its feet hanging out of her beak as she swallowed it. The first of the owlets is due to hatch any minute now, and I'm having a hard time getting any work done. I don't want to miss watching this spectacle unfold.

long, long ago in a high school far, far away...

2010-03-04T10:29:00.005-06:00

Pellet's Greatest Adventure: A DIY Story in Pictures

they say it's a buyer's market

2010-02-25T13:30:00.004-06:00

One of the CSIs from the crime scene diorama in Science told Pellet that he got a sweet deal on a corrugated cardboard ranch house over in the T wing. Built-in astroturf, and locker-adjacent. So yesterday Pellet rolled on down to Introduction to Architecture to see if there was any tempting real estate for a single hamster with slight coffee stain and original tags.

As you can see, he found some appealing homes, but none of them really seemed ideally suited to him.

This one already had dust bunnies living in it.

This one has a nice yard and some attached rental properties, but Pellet doesn't want to take on the responsibilities of being a landlord. That can be awkward if you own in a neighborhood where your home may be whisked away overnight without warning by something called a Physical Plant. (He's never seen a Physical Plant, and doesn't know much about botany, but it's a scary thought.)

Well, this is just silly, obviously.

This one was very tempting and he was close to making an offer on it, but at the last minute he got self-conscious about frightening the neighbors and decided against it. Not everyone is cool about hamsters who are as tall as their house.

So in the end he came home to his toasty spot under the monitor.

admiral of the uss dallas

2010-02-23T13:52:00.003-06:00

In recognition of some quite sensitive work he's been doing on behalf of Certain Persons, Pellet was recently given his own model of the USS Dallas for personal and office use. He's very proud, and is very grateful to the engineer who constructed this floating marvel (using some empty plastic bottles and the fan from an old computer - it's important to think green in the Pellet Navy). Mike is pictured below, twirling Pellet's whiskers for maximum officialness, and delivering a salute. Thanks, Mike!

sick day.

2010-02-19T10:50:00.002-06:00

I have a cold. I also have projects to do, and since there's no one else in the office today I came in for a couple of hours to do some urgent work. I think I passed my germs on to Pellet. He's feeling woozy and is having a lie-down with an ice pack, and wrapped in my scarf. He's being watched over by a sweet birdie nurse, made by Shana.

a project of blinding sparkleocity.

2010-02-17T15:16:00.005-06:00

I've been working on earrings for a wedding party for the last several weeks: five bridesmaids and a maid of honor. The bride wanted everyone's earrings to be different, but thematically similar and to fit with their colors for the wedding: silver and crimson. Her (brilliant and thoughtful) logic is this: all these women know each other and when they go out somewhere and want to wear this jewelry again, the chances are that at least some of the others will be there, and no one wants to be wearing the same earrings as someone else. So, six different designs.

I wanted to choose one bead to use as an anchor that would appear in each design and tie them all together. I chose a vintage garnet Swarovski sunshine crystal to be the common denominator, and made everything else as different as I could.

We finalized the designs last weekend, and these are the results. I'm pretty pleased with them. And I'm looking forward to the wedding. Congratulations J & C!

why is the rum gone?!

2010-02-17T12:37:00.002-06:00

Pirate Pellet, Terror of the Seas, captains his trusty paperclippership through a perilous fluorescent light storm. Dashing pirate hat stylings by his student friend, Rin. Anxious look occurs naturally.

missing!

2010-02-12T13:45:00.003-06:00

One day, a bad thing happened. I came back from lunch and Pellet was gone! He wasn't hiding on my desk or in the drawers or on my chair or on the floor. I accused the department prankster of taking him. He scoffed at me. I accused the rest of the department of taking him. They took offense.

And then I got the email:

He had been kidnapped. I awaited further instructions, and was eventually able to negotiate Pellet's ransom with a piece of yellow cake (buttercream frosting and sprinkles). He was returned to me the next day with his little hands bound together by a rubber band and a corner scrap of black plastic bag over his head (that's a true story, but it was years ago and I didn't think to take a picture - probably quite an offensive picture, anyway...).

Anyway, eventually he got over it and came out from the warm spot behind my computer tower (his safe place), and has thrived. (Thriven? Throve? He thrives. Whatever.) I maintain that he suffered a touch of Stockholm Syndrome, because one of his kidnappers was Scott (his coach and choreographer from Dance Day), but he doesn't seem to have any permanent damage.

headdesk

2010-02-11T14:49:00.002-06:00

Here at High School, Pellet overhears a lot of drivel. Some examples:

"I hope he doesn't grade on content."
"I think I want, you know, a really hot boyfriend."
"Hang on, I'm, like, totally concentrated on filling this waterbottle."

Sometimes he's overcome and just has to put his head down for a minute.

dance day

2010-02-10T13:01:00.002-06:00

Today we have Pellet doing the gopher dance from Caddyshack. Here's the original:

That's Scott, assisting with coaching and choreography. That's me, laughing so hard you can't really hear him singing. The first time he made Pellet do the gopher dance was 7 years ago, and it still cracks me up just as much every time I see it. Scott can also say the entire introduction to the A-Team. So, you know, he's handy to have around. Thanks, Scott!

hot tubbing

2010-02-09T12:20:00.003-06:00

Relaxing in the inbox with Yes and No.

UPDATEwhichishouldhaveincluded: Yes/No bunnies made by the brilliant and so-funny Jessica at Spidercamp. For all your obscene and snarky bunny needs. (Mom & Dad, cover your eyes. I mean it, no peeking.)

the true adventures of pellet in high school

2010-02-05T11:34:00.004-06:00

So I think I mentioned I have this beanie baby hamster thingy. I acquired him several years ago, and he's been sitting on my desk as a sort of unofficial mascot as long as I've worked here. The kids seem to like him; sometimes they ask if they can have him (no.). Staff members like to arrange him in poses, give him props, bring other stuffies to sit next to him, and on occasion, perform nefarious deeds such as Kidnappings or Concealments.

Having absolutely no ideas for a February blog project, I've decided to make February the month of Pellet. I'll be sharing some of his adventures and pictures. The picture above is Pellet's current pose, looking at me over my monitor. One of the interns balanced him on the very narrow top edge of the screen and when he got jostled he performed some kind of beanbag-butt-backwards magic flip and lodged here:

And there he'll stay until his next outing. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of Pellet in High School!

2010-02-01T13:31:00.010-06:00

Hey, I won a prize! The lovely Cassie of ShopClementine awarded me this cool Kreativ Blogger thingie. Which is really, really nice, as I love her blog - particularly her Things I've Found in the Woods posts.

Here's what this means for you: you get to find out 7 things about me that you didn't know. Here's what this means for me: I get to give this award to 7 other bloggers.

Ok, here we go. Get ready.

1. I watched Jennifer's Body last weekend. {I know.}
2. I have absolutely no desire to own a house. I'm all house-proud and nesty and domestic with my living space, but I'd rather not actually own it.
3. I'm allergic to raw apples.
4. I failed my driving test the first time I took it.
5. I have an unreasonable attachment to a Beanie Baby hamster named Pellet who lives on my desk at the office. (stay tuned for more on Pellet - I think he might be my February blog project)
6. I don't have a middle name.
7. Right now, there's an autistic boy waiting in my office for his social worker. He likes to test me by saying lines from movies and asking if they're Disney or some other animated movie studio. I fail often at this game. He tires of me quickly.

And now, having fulfilled my awardly duty and revealed 7 Secrets of Me, I pass the torch to the following bloggers:

1. Brenda http://brennneda.blogspot.com/
2. Dennice http://www.dennicemankarious.blogspot.com/
3. Faith http://untamedlily.blogspot.com/?zx=abfe899f11e0eae9
4. Abby http://mavora.typepad.com/mavora-art-and-design/blog_index.html
5. Heidi http://redchairshop.blogspot.com/
6. Katie http://skunkboycreatures.blogspot.com/
7. Leslie http://leastterrible.blogspot.com/

the beekeeper's apprentice, by laurie r king

2010-01-31T12:10:00.003-06:00

It's January 31, the last day of my What I'm Reading posts. I missed a handful of days around the middle of the month, but I'm kind of shocked I managed to do this almost as planned.

I just finished The Beekeeper's Apprentice today. Laurie King's novel is a bit difficult to classify: I'm not sure if I should call it a mystery, a historical fantasy, young adult fiction, or something else. Her protagonist is Mary Russell, a teenager in Sussex, England during the first World War. Ms. Russell meets the retired Sherlock Holmes, and finding herself presented with a mind as sharp as her own, becomes a sort of apprentice to the master criminologist.

Under normal circumstances, I really dislike the use of an existing literary character by another author, particularly when it's one I know and love so well. I came across a glowing recommendation of the Mary Russell series on a blog recently (I think it was either feministing.com or Salon.com's Broadsheet, but I can't find the link now), and since I was embarking on a whole stack of pleasurable holiday reading, I added the first book of the series to the pile. Given my prejudices, I was mostly expecting to be irate from the get-go, but I was surprised. Mary Russell is that somewhat implausible character of fiction - orphaned, wealthy, brilliant , well-spoken and determined; but she is also well-written and likable. Sherlock Holmes as written by Laurie King is surprisingly intact (mostly). He's lost something of his famed misogyny, obviously, since he's taken on a teenage girl as an apprentice, but King navigates that neatly by setting Mary up as the first intellectual equal Holmes has ever encountered (apart from his brother, Mycroft, and his notorious nemesis Professor Moriarty). He's intrigued and challenged, and pursues the friendship in spite of himself.

The mystery plot is ordinary, but it held my interest. There were a couple of spots where a contemporary turn of phrase or coy literary device were jarring, but I have to say I didn't really care. As a feminist hero, Mary Russell is something of a treat, and I had a really good time reading this. Two thumbs up.

the best american nonrequired reading 2007, ed. by dave eggers

2010-01-30T11:14:00.003-06:00

The Best American Nonrequired Reading series is a favorite of mine for train reading. The series includes lists, short stories, comics/graphic novels, tv scripts, essays, memoir and other nonfiction pieces that were published throughout the collection year. I've chosen 2007 because it's the one I read most recently, but they're all great. The series is edited by Dave Eggers, and the pieces are chosen by high school students from the San Francisco Bay area who participate in Eggers' writing center.

My favorite pieces from this collection are a profoundly upsetting story about Hurricane Katrina, called "American Cheese," by Joshua Clark, and a short story by artist/filmmaker Miranda July called "How to Tell Stories to Children." There's also a hilarious list called "Best American Names for Horses Expected to Have Undistinguished Careers." Great stuff.

the wellspring: poems, by sharon olds

2010-01-29T13:43:00.004-06:00

My introduction to Sharon Olds' poetry was in May of 1995, when her poem "January, Daughter" appeared in the New Yorker. One of my favorite professors had just had her first child, and I clipped the poem out of the magazine to give to her. The spare intimacy of it was striking. She is the most physical of poets - her work is sharp and uncluttered, but will move you so powerfully into the realm of an idea or belief that you feel it in your body. I have all of her books of poetry, and choosing this particular one to recommend is really mostly random. I'm basing my choice on the fact that I wanted to use a specific poem here, and it's in The Wellspring. Like a lot of Olds' work, it's both funny and devastating; it feels light, but you'll notice it hanging around later on.

Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil
by Sharon Olds

In the strange quiet, I realize
there's no on else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill--
Charlie is dead, the last of our children's half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body like a blueprint
of the understructure for a woman's body,
so now everything stops for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful calls of a young animal.