Author Illustrator Designer
Design Sponge posted a fabulous homage to everyone’s favorite capitol of Rhode Island, Providence!
If you are one of the many former students who has come here and studied, this tribute is bound to make you nostalgic.
If you have never been here, what are you waiting for??
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!
That’s right, Maine!
And I didn’t JUST buy tacky souvenirs while there, either.
OK, maybe a few.
I will post some nice pictures later today after I get a few loads of laundry done and start going thru all the e-mail. Later!
I thought I would show you some of my recent antique/flea market finds!
Here’s a nifty owl that simply screams “70’s”:
Anything that screams 70’s makes me happy, what can I say?
Hankies are also happy things, so long as your not blowing your nose into them.
Here’s one for my bunny collection:
And oh, look…it’s LARD!
You don’t see honkin’ big packs of lard anymore.
Gee, I can’t imagine why.
Nowadays, they just insert the lard directly into your processed foods…no fuss, no muss!
I like stuff like this package from the past not only for it’s absurdity, but the graphics.
I will put it into my Dubois 5+10 area (a shelf of similar things).
How cute are these little guys!
Yeah, I know it’s not anywhere near Christmas, but I picked these up for my mom.
Are you reading this blog, Mom? DON’T LOOK!
Here’s something for the fall:
This will be the ideal thing to wear to the annual Apple Fest, oh yeah!
And last but not least (and not even last)…
FABRIC!
Sweet piles of vintage scraps destashed by a hoarder…let me hoard thee now!
That’s all for now…
I think I’ll be taking a blog break while summer is still here.
Plenty of time for this in the fall (not really, but you know what I mean!)
Here’s our remaining old girl cat, Georgia, on my desk. Obviously, she is not hanging out with the balsam pillows. Instead, she is 100% asleep and precariously dangling her neck over the side of my desk. Ironically, she is right near a Mary Blair book I was looking thru that happens to have an orange cat just like her in it. After I took this picture, I gingerly put her head back on the desk. It scared the bejeezus out of her.
Silly old cat!
Barb tagged me for a little exercise in randomness…here’s what I was supposed to do:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.*
3. Find the fifth sentence.**
4. Post the next three sentences, so if my math is correct that’d be sentences six, seven and eight.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to the blogger who tagged you.
The alternate PB version is to go to page 23 and just put down the text.
Well, OK then…remarkably, I cleaned my desk recently, and there were NO books on it (!!)
So I went to my special book shelf (where I keep my signed books) and pulled off Lyle Finds His Mother, by Bernard Waber. Here’s the surprisingly pivotal scene I found:
Gosh I love Lyle…he was a big favorite of mine as a child. I met Bernard Waber in 1990, at RISD, I guess.
Eesh, that was a long time ago!
I’ll tag:
Kim Norman
Jannie Ho
Kathy Weller
There is a wonderful old greenhouse in Connecticut called Logee’s that has been open since 1892. It is one of the few places here in New England where you can walk through the door…
…and instantly feel like you have entered a tropical rainforest. It makes for a great day trip when you are totally sick of cold weather (which always seems to hold on juuuust a little too long around here).
It doesn’t matter what time of year you go, there are always things in full bloom.
I was on a citrus mission this day.
For unexplained reasons, I have always wanted to have my own orange trees, or lemon trees, or lime trees. This is going back to the time I was 10 or so. Maybe it IS explained, actually. I won a trip to Florida/Disney World when I was this age, and the sheer tropicality of Florida made a big impression on me, I guess.
The 100-year old Wonder Lemon tree at Logee’s is amazing-it’s comfortably growing right into the ground of the greenhouse, and seems to always be producing gigantic lemons (like up to 5 pounds!).
That’s Eric, The Jungle Boy.
Here’s my little box of citrus (plus one orchid), ready to come home with me.
And here are my new studio inhabitants!
The biggest one I had gotten a while back- it’s a Kaffir Lime. Now it is joined by a baby Grapefruit, a Key Lime, a Buddha’s Hand, a Meyer Lemon, a Sunquat, and an Australian Finger Lime. Plus one Salu Spot orchid. So far, they’re all doing well and have new growth. I knew from the Kaffir Lime that the studio was a good place to grow stuff. They add a nice living touch to the studio too. And hopefully some oxygen. We spend a lot of time in here!
