petals + patience

top (l) to (r): vintage aster and chrysanthemum illustrations/next week's tutorial/dead garden roses to study

bottom (l) to (r): vintage wallpaper/drying a fat gerber daisy to study/a page from a wonderful vintage seed catalogue

Today is the last day before both kids are on spring break. They are prepared for the most boring-est spring break ever. This will be the staycation to end all staycations. I have mentally prepared them that I will have my nose to the grindstone for the next nine days trying to make the best of the time. I'm sure it's going to go great. (Not.)

Every room in our place is like a garden right now. There are half-finished blossoms everywhere, and images of flowers all over the place. Paper shreds everywhere. It's kookoo! 

But everyone is on board. David and the kids are tolerating SO MUCH inconvenience, and in return I have promised an awesome May and and awesome summer. I hope I can deliver on that.

Have a great weekend, and if you are one of the many, many people who have asked me to share my giant "closed" peony tutorial, guess what? I'm doing it as Carte Fini's featured artist for April, and if all goes well it will be up on Monday, so please check back!

xoxo

fresh bread

I am spending a lot of time these days riding the highs and lows of being chin deep in a project and being beyond exhausted. The highs are lessening and the lows are hard, but I know at the end of April it'll all be normal again so I try not to fret. 

One thing that made me feel good this weekend was making bread. I am serious. White bread. One of the least healthy foods on the planet, I know. But taking the time to mix it up with the kids, watching it rise, making a few different variations on it and incorporating it into both our Saturday dinner and Sunday breakfast made me feel like the wife and mother I want to be but can't be right now. 

It's been out for a few years now, but if you haven't checked out Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day you should. These loaves are the buttermilk bread recipe because I happened to have buttermilk in the refrigerator. I added a swirl of chocolate, sugar and cinnamon to the Sunday morning loaf, a variation on the cinnamon raisin bread recipe from the book.

Back to work now. Have a great week!

xoxo

round up: christmas passed

Christmas has finally passed. We had a wonderful holiday, as always. My mother was here for almost two weeks which gave David and I time to have several date nights, hooray! It was so nice to have her here. You folks who live near your relatives, consider yourselves lucky!

All of us were sick at some point during the winter break and there was a little cabin fever going on at the end, but mostly we stayed around the homestead like we love to do, cooked a lot of food and had a wonderful time. And did a lot of playing.

 Salt dough.

 Walking home after the last school day of the year, nothing better!

 Pine cones on the best tree we've ever had, placed in a new location that we loved.

 My ornaments sold pretty well during the holidays, and were featured on Daily Candy.

 A sweet card from David.

Post Christmas snuggles.

My mock-vintage bulb reflectors really work, by the way!

 We all camped out in Stella's room again.

 Some of the sweetest things we gave Stella. MIKODESIGN Frida doll set here. Tiny postal set here.

 Some of the best things I received. Amazing Cathy Callahan tassel bracelets from David and the Lego Architecture Studio set I wanted from my mother. I must've been good this year.

Santa brought a giant hotel for Stella. He probably didn't realize it takes a day of work to build.

David and I worked through our colds with a lot of ginger and rye. It became a thing to serve it over ice donuts. I had two commissions to finish up over the holidays, which was a little tough. Last one goes

out today, yay!

Right before the end.

I'm feeling so fortunate these days in so many ways and am excited for the new year, but I am truly sad the holidays are over. They went by way too quick this year. I'm not into Christmas starting November 1st, which is definitely the status quo, but I do believe in stretching it out as far into January as feels natural. We just took our tree out to the street yesterday, super-ceremoniously, of course.

This entire holiday season I was so melancholic for snow. I miss it so much, and envy all my friends and family back on the East Coast, polar vortex or not. I hope you are staying warm and are enjoying a good start to the new year. Have a great weekend!

xoxo

round up: ramping up

David and I joke about this. I'm round and sweet, and he's dark, bitter, and everyone loves him (including me).

There is very little balance at home right now. Our flat is a whirlwind of paper scraps and papier mâché from Sunday night through Tuesday afternoon when I do the majority of my work and then have recovered enough to straighten up. The One Kings Lane sale went so well that I have been asked to provide cards and ornaments for another artisan sale starting November 21st. I also just delivered a big order of ornaments to Rare Device and to the set of my online class coming up on Friday, and I am feeling really happy and extremely lucky to have stumbled onto this work for now.

Everything else is a little out of whack, though. I remember the days where my only goal was to get one donut post out a week while I was home with Oliver. Now I am in the mode where I can't stop anything I'm doing. Can't stop putting feelers out for more opportunities, can't catch up with what I'm doing right now, and feeling totally exhilarated. But boy is our place taking a hit in the cleanliness department. David has picked up the slack big time, but I am dreaming of the day (hopefully soon) where papel SF is getting so many orders that I can justify renting a studio space, preferably shared with David so he can enjoy it as well. Coming soon with any luck.

For now it's a conscious effort to make sure the kids get enough attention, that I bathe and that I am still home cooking most nights. I am putting my mind to all those things that suffer when I get in "work mode", because I know there is balance to be found there. It just takes the kind of effort that everything else does and it is important to take the time to figure out how all of it can work together harmoniously. I'm planting the seeds now which usually assures I'll have acted on it in a few months, because I always change at a glacial pace.

Below are few photos from the past few weeks. Not a lot to take photos of around here, besides the mess!

I received my copy of German Couch Magazine with a short piece on my braided basket.

Waiting for the bus with Oliver's preschool for a Dia de Los Muertos field trip to honor their fallen fish.

Persimmon time. I adore crisp fuyu persimmons, but here are my hachiya persimmon pudding donuts, which I love just as much!

Oliver is allowed to pick at and play with my eggshell casualties. Here, goose eggshells.

Stella's idea of an awesome Saturday. Mine, too.

Everything happens here, including a donut project up on the shelf that I may never find time to finish and share!

Oliver and his schoolmates.

Oliver's calavera. Look at the control on those teeth! Beyond is their altar for their beta fish.

That's all for now. I'd love for you tune in to watch my DIY Holiday Woodland Ornament class coming up Friday morning at 9:00 PST with creativeLIVE. Click here to register to see it for free (you can always purchase it and other great classes to download for use any time as well). If you watch it, PLEASE let me know. Any and all critiques are welcome! We had the pre-production meeting today and I'm still nervous, but I'm pretty excited as well.

Have a great weekend! xoxo

round up: just the usual

A skull I made resting atop his and hers interlocking petrified wood slices from Utah.

Just the usual. Snapping some shots around the house. I do leave once in a while, I swear, but I'm a little overwhelmed with things I need to do right now so I've been spending a lot of time here. None of it spent cleaning unfortunately.

Lunch a la Oliver.

Our small opaque white Heath collection.

And a small portion of my beloved Fire-King collection.

Paper fuschia trial and error.

Both Stella and Oliver spent most of their time at the Grand Canyon this summer chasing the squirrels

instead of enjoying the view. I got them these inexpensive squirrel pillows from H & M Home. 

They were actually so inexpensive that I finally got duvet covers and the like for everyone. Animals everywhere!

I am a sucker for stamps. My absolute favorite are the USPS pine cone and pine needle stamps

that came out last year (not pictured). Have you ever seen the stamp covered bird house I made? 

I almost never photograph Stella's room anymore. Here's why.

And here's the best part of Stella having a pet snake: this cool museum looking cage.

I love seeing which tchotchkes Stella likes to display around her room. Here's a mushroom from Tin Tin, a Terra Cotta Warrior from one of David's trips, a camera she made in preschool from wood and bottle caps, a pooping chicken, a fan my friend Liza brought me from Spain long ago.

Have you ever checked out Stella's room in its more pristine state? You can see how it looked when we first pulled her room together here. It was so clean for a minute!

round up: nothing going on but the rent

round up: meanwhile, back at the ranch

School starts soooooon. I'm mortified about how fast this summer has flown by. Two weeks of camp plus two and a half weeks of (wonderous) vacation doesn't leave much time in between to be as lazy as I'd like us to be. We live in a bubble, provided by David and created by me, and the thought of Stella going back to school in three weeks brings tears to my eyes whenever I think of it. We are SO spoiled, I know. We've been doing what we do best over the last two weeks: nothing.

Breakfast.

Fort.

Lunch.

Art.

Dinner, sliced and roasted.

The first night of Stella and my new tradition, midnight snack + giggles. ♥

I added palpable space to our small kitchen by moving the booze. Who knew?

A day at the California Academy of Sciences. Here they are there a little over a year ago. They have grown!

Twenty nine day old baby ostrich. Wow!

After seeing Brave. How beautiful.

He's a toy robot.

I struggle all the time with the fact I'm not bringing in any money, or really living a modern grown-up woman's life at all, and that I am happy as a clam here all day while David is commuting and working his ass off. It's the best for our kids, it's certainly the best for ME, but is it the best for all of us in the long run? It's a big deal. I don't have a single minute of regret, except for David's commute, but I wonder if one day I will. I wonder why I find it so easy be lying on the floor with the kids all day, playing this or that. What is this? Sometimes I seriously wonder if I am some strange woman-child, and if people see me that way. I bought the book Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe years ago to try to sort through (and justify) some of these feelings, but I was always too busy to read it. Sometimes to assuage my guilt over my good fortune I remind myself that I worked SO hard and SO long for very little for a very long time, and that right up until Oliver was born I was still pulling all-nighters. Taking care of these two kids has been the biggest respite I could've hoped for. Not really having to use my head is a very peaceful place to be.

I can't really imagine feeling bad about having taken complete advantage of these last three years to be with these two, and to grow myself exponentially. But what if, years down the road, we end up with less to give Oliver and Stella than we would've liked, because I stayed home. It's really hard to see what hindsight will look like then. It's a tough one. I am (we are, really) looking for ways to start to tip the scales a bit. It's been a GREAT ride, but like I've said before, it's probably time for me to put my big girl pants back on and just NEVER forget how lucky I have been. Too bad I can't get my thighs into ANY pants, at the moment.