Author Illustrator Designer
I love hunting around at thrift stores, yard sales, and places like Savers because you never know what will turn up. Here are a couple of pieces that I think are particularly nice.
This chick jar, made in West Germany, has a great simplicity in design and color. Love it!
The mug with the houses comes from England. Great graphics, Batman! Not afraid of color, are they?
I keep these two pieces near each other because I think they have a similar (awesome) vibe!
We were lucky enough to do some traveling this summer, both visiting with far-flung family and your usual sightseeing. We spent 5 days in Alsace, the grapey part of France bordering Germany, then went for 6 days to the Black Forest in Germany, then another 6 days in Bavaria. Needless to say these are visually stunning areas, and I took waaaay too many pictures. But hey, the blog has been ignored for quite a while, so here we go!
First things first. We flew into Frankfurt and stayed there for a night before driving to Alsace. You should know something about Germany. In Germany, the eggs wear hats!
Driving down to Alsace, we stopped in the town of Wissembourg. They have an unfinished cathedral there.
Complete with delightfully macabre medieval graves.
Alsatian towns are unbelievably beautiful. Nearly every town we passed through was picturesque.
Where else but New York City! I just got back from a whirlwind 4-day stay in the Large Apple with some of my most excellent illustrating gal pals. Two of the aforementioned pals had their own booths at Surtex for the first time, and the rest of us went to cheer them on, help out, and walk the shows. Barb’s booth was bursting with licensing goodness:
And Monica’s was all a-flutter with fun freshness:
Barb and Monica did an AMAZING job of putting these booths together, they truly looked excellent! Surtex (or any show like this) can be grueling in terms of setup/breakdown, and manning the booth for the whole time. Way to go, girls, for managing this. We also got to see a bunch of other blog buddies and other illustrators, like Jannie Ho and Holli Conger. Very fun to see everyone converging in one place!
Laura and I also got to check out the ICFF/International Contemporary Furniture Fair.
Despite the name, there is no cotton candy or pig racing at this fair. You will, instead find things like this:
Lots of furniture, lighting concepts, and home fixtures of all kinds. I always like to check this show out since some of my Fred work falls into this genre of design. Speaking of design, here’s Laura in the fabulous Japanese pavillion:
Here’s one of Mary Beth’s two Louie-nominated greeting cards at the Stationery Show:
And OH! Look! Here’s Mary Beth with the actual Louie Award that she won! WooHoo! The Louies are given to the the best greeting cards of the previous year. MB’s cards were designed for the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
Our hotel had excellent views of about a hundred water tanks!
And look at this ridiculously green rooftop garden amongst the grey. I never once saw anyone up there enjoying it!
As usual, you can never predict what you’ll see in New York.
Maybe you’ll see:
A ginormous button and needle. We couldn’t figure out the weird configuration of button holes on that button. Then we decided it was “art”.
I love this homage to the city’s immigrant garment workers!
Weeniemobiles…times three!
Giant rotating lobsta! And a chick in a bathing suit looking on. Weird.
Serious M&Ming going on at the 3-level M&M store…
Or, if you prefer your chocolate to be Hershey’s, just go across the street.
My hero George M. Cohan will gladly show you the way to any of the freaky sights in Times Square. Just be glad I didn’t take a picture of The Naked Cowboy.
One of my must-go-to-places in NYC…the giant Toys R Us, complete with Ferris wheel inside!
Life-size functional Tyrannosaurus? This is always amusing no matter how many times I’ve seen it.
Likewise insanely large things made out of Legos.
Speaking of which, look at these cool Harry Potter Lego guys in the FAO Schwarz:
To cap off the Surtex/NY experience, we went to Angelo’s in Little Italy for an amazing dinner. It was sort of like Federal Hill, but, um…more so!
We’ll be back next year to do it all again!
Here are a few new items currently on the shelves:
April’s Highlights High Five has Deviled Eggs!
And after you’ve made yourself some nice deviled eggs, sit back with April’s Rachael Ray magazine and check out this:
There’s “Calf and Half” again!
I have to hand it to Rach and her “people”…they do find fun stuff for the magazine. Look at the knitted fruit! And the adorable Mary Jane wellies! On the same page is a product by my friend Christy, too…”Pound,” a set of nails for driving into your finger food (not your fingers). How constructive!
I have a bunch of fun new items starting to pop up here and there-
I’ll show you some of them soon.
I’ve had A LOT of work lately, so sometimes the blog gets the cold shoulder!
And by the way, Happy St. Pat’s Day!
…is already upon us.
And you know what THAT means:
VINTAGE VALENTINES!
Who cares about flowers and candy.
These are so much cooler!
These are from the good ol’ days of Valentine exchanging.
Kid’s valentines today are so lame…they don’t even come with teeny envelopes that you had to write on and seal. Not to mention, only the very youngest of kids even exchange cards now- like maybe 2nd grade and down. By 3rd or 4th grade, everyone’s too cool for this sort of thing.
Sigh.
Well, I still have every Valentine I have ever received since Kindergarten, plus a few hundred more.
Love them!
I’ll try to post more of these lovely old bits this month. I am otherwise insanely busy with deadlines and will need to be working over the upcoming weeks…woohoo!
Any other Valentine collectors out there?
Check out these beee-you-teee-ful tiles I found at Savers two weeks ago:
Sometimes you just get lucky!
I don’t really know anything about these, only that they are really nice. And made in Denmark. If anyone knows anything more about them- feel free to tell me!
I do love shopping at Savers (and yard sales, garage sales, etc.) purely for the fun of finding the unexpected. I get a lot of my etsy fabrics there.
Have you all been having a lovely time this season?
Been doing a little decorating?
This is my “Five and Dime” area, decked out for the holidays.
Have you been feeding the birds? The muse? The face?
(I have on all counts!)
I have definitely been taking a holiday break from the blog (and a lot of other things) as I focused on other stuff for a while. Most of the other stuff has been good, so no complaints here! I’ve been pursuing a gentle blend of work laced with baking and decorating.
Laundry? Not so much.
We spent a good portion of November and December as stage hands, etc. for the local version of “A Christmas Carol,” which our kids were in.
I don’t know about you, but I am a Christmas Carol addict. I know every version and have read it a load of times, it’s an all-time favorite. So even though the stage production took up A LOT of time, it was very fun.
Here’s Scrooge watching the Cratchits and realizing the error of his ways:
Oh, and look! There he is on Christmas morning, all happy-like!
Our version had Charles Dickens as the narrator.
I made Christmas Carol-themed cookies for our concession stand, and for the cast party.
Here are Marley, Past and Present:
Speaking of cookies, I made lots more of them since we have a cookie exchange every year at the FRED office. It’s a good excuse to whip out the cookie cutters and molds.
Molds?
Yeah, molds!
These are some of my speculaas molds…the must-have accessory if you are a glutton for punishment and enjoy medieval baking processes. I mean, who doesn’t??
After many hours of having the dough “set up”, and then molding them, the cookies end up looking like this:
Closer up, you can see all the delightful detail.
It’s ALL ABOUT the detail when you’re making these.
Here are some of my traditional cutout cookies.
It’s not Christmas without lobsters, I always say. At least I say it this year!
These wintery months have brought a flurry (haha) of good press lately for some of my products.
Calf and Half has been featured on The Today Show (woo hoo!) and in the Chicago Tribune (Yowza!), and even in Oprah’s O at Home Magazine!
Ice Princess made it into the December issue of Good Housekeeping!
Well, isn’t that nice. I love me some good press.
I recently made a few new things for my Etsy shop:
These make me happy because I am starting have a real convergence of my art style overlapping with my craft style, and vice versa.
I think I am finding a stronger “voice”, sort of.
Nice.
Here’s another nice thing, made by a very nice kid who lives here:
Do you know who this is made out of snow? Guess!
In the meantime, I guess I’ll get back to whatever it is that I should be doing.
Oh, yeah…it’s tea time. I should be making tea!
Y’know…EVERY day should be random cuteness day. Here’s a dose now:
I love to sew and embroider, but I cannot knit or crochet. Therefore, I enjoy the work of people who can. It started with ONE octopus. But it was too cute. We needed more.
Now, each kid has one, and so do I.
Now we can do stuff like this:
These particular bits of cuteness come from All About Kendra’s Etsy shop.
Way to crochet, Connie!
Yes, truly- the knarly, distinctly organic apples that grow in our orchard are technically harvestable already. Maybe not ALL of them, but a whole bunch. Like hundreds. So what to do?
PIE, of course!
You have to roll out the crust:
Ask your pony friends to fill the crusts:
And lastly, bake them with My Little Pony, cats and octopi on them.
Octopi? Octo-pie? OH, haha…I just got that one!
Well, that’s what fall is like around here!
Well, as I alluded to in my last “post”…I spent a good part of last week in coastal Maine, the part they call MidCoast. We had a nice rental cottage in New Harbor, very close to Pemaquid Point. Here’s the view from Colonial Pemaquid’s fort:
Apparently, this area had been colonized in the early 1600s (displacing the native American tribes, naturally). I had no idea. I bet Maine kids know this, but down in RI all you hear about is Plimoth Plantations! Seriously, follow that link, it’s way interesting.
Since the place has been clocked down a hundred times and rebuilt, it’s amazing that the original cemetery is still there:
Across the street from our cottage each morning was a home made donut stand. Sweeeet.
Behind the donut stand were 3 horses and a donkey. Donkeys make weird noises, especially at 5 am.
Not a cute “hee-haw”, no. More like a nails-on-a-chalkboard squeal.
What an ass! He was cute, though.
We were very lucky with the weather. Very, considering everyone up there told us the summer had been a bit of a washout (not unlike RI, too). Here’s Boothbay Harbor:
Boothbay has a great Botanical Garden– we had fun checking out all the nooks and crannies:
That last one shows an area designated for making “fairy houses”, which we did.
I absolutely LOVE this art in an ice cream shop in Boothbay:
Somehow, I NEVER thought of how a littleneck would eat ice cream…now I know!
The Pemaquid lighthouse and point are gorgeous:
This is the lighthouse that appears on the back of the Maine quarter- and I can see why. It’s pretty much a quintessential storybook lighthouse! The rocky zones all around it are excellent to poke around on…you find fun stuff like this:
I made a new friend in Pemaquid!
We had lobsters one night, right off the pier. This came with mixed emotions, because we here at Maison Dubois happen to love lobsters (the living kind). The kids want to keep one as a pet. And yet…MY GOD they’re good eatin’!
After staying out in these parts, we meandered home slowly along the coast, checking out lots of lovely coves and more lighthouses:
We went to the York Zoo, and were happy to see so many animals that our local zoo doesn’t have!
Capybaras! And a capybaby! I was a Bill Peet fanatic as a kid, so getting to see capybaras is a treat.
OK, goats aren’t very exotic, but anytime you get to hand feed piles of baby goats, that’s a good day!
How cute are prairie dogs? They’re even cuter when drinking out of a bowl!
This is the most amazing bird ever to me:
It’s got tiger stripes! Spots! Every color! Just crazy, man. I love it.
What is it? Um, it’s a..a…Lady something-or-other. I’ll find out.
They also had a butterfly garden going:
And what’s a vacation without tchotchkes?
I wouldn’t know, I’ve never taken one!
Here are my my classy souvenirs:
A lobster tile, a handcarved owl on driftwood, and the cutest cat mini-vase/toothpick holder.
And a few tackier items:
Another balsam pillow, this one with the Pemaquid lighthouse on it. (You know I love me some balsam!). A few patches to sew onto my patch bench. And a lobster cookie cutter.
Oh, yeah! Guess what everyone’s getting at this year’s cookie exchange!
We were lucky to stop by Newburyport, Mass. on the way home. The Child At Heart Gallery is closing it’s brick-and-mortar shop there, and we were able to get some awesome art at a discount- these pieces are by Chris Demarest and David McPhail. Whee!
Now it’s all about back to work and back to school. Booo!
