accessorizing, organizing, watching, cooking

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We get a lot of guests. And some are more rewarding than others. Last week Justine and her daughter Kenalee came for a last minute overnighter. Justine was running in RAGNAR. As a thank you gift Justine gave me this set of her grandmother's pearls. This is completely excessive on so many levels. Too think she would give me something so personally meaningful. I am touched beyond words. And the fact that I really do like pearls, but only special pearls. I have my lovely 10th Anniversary pearls. I have my mother's wedding pearls and now these.

 

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This is the Summer of skirts and some new bigger accessories for me. The long R necklace came from the Velvet Button Boutique on Monroe St. And looks great with grandma's pearls. And I got all these new earrings on etsy. I searched retro, mod, 60s, 70s... Some actually are from the 70s!

 

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I am always decluttering and on a quest for more organization. I found 14 of these ceramic dishes at commercial kitchen supply store. Since I have 8 of these small drawers in my office they are a find. I also found out that I have way more black pens than I ever thought. But now I will use them instead of buying yet another box.

 

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Season 3 is coming soon! Airs June 28 - August 2.

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And Orange is the new Black is what I am watching this week as I work on "Dear Rae". Well that, and I am rewatching Gilmore Girls. An interesting combination for my work day. Finished "Grace and Frankie" and am glad it was renewed for next year.

 

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Made these Salsa Verde Enchiladas this week. Very good. Got a rotisserie chicken at Costco. My first and it was really big and had more then enough chicken for this recipe. This will be a do-over recipe. Next time I may try and use a crunchier tortilla. But made according to the recipe it is gluten-free.

 

shopping, lettering, reading, writing

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I am becoming less and less of a shopper. Probably because I am in a serious decluttering mode. And shopping eventually leads to more decluttering. But I could not resist this Souvenir de Paris deskset. The little box in the front is an inkwell. This treasure was accompanied by this sweet note from Jill. You can visit her tempting etsy store at JBBPensPaper.

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My new font, Dear Rae,  is coming along rather nicely. By the end of the week I hope to have all the letters drawn and in the font program. Now I have about 350 characters. The above pen is what I am using for this font. And ink, of course.

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I just discovered vintage postage at Jim's Coins at Hilldale here in Madison! I spent some time going though pages and pages of stamps and bringing many of them home. Since I write to people weekly this adds a little something special to my notes. And while I did buy enough that they gave me a discount it is just postage and will get used up.

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This book is every bit as good as everyone says. It is 500 pages and I both cannot put it down and know I will hate it when I've finished it.

Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks. When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris in June of 1940, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure’s.

Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of multiple characters, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. - anthonydoerr.com

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; winner of the Australian International Book Award; a #1 New York Times bestseller; the 2014 Book of the Year at Hudson Booksellersthe #2 book of 2014 at Amazon.com; a LibraryReads Favorite of Favorites; named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review; a best book of 2014 at Powell’s BooksBarnes & Noble, NPR’s Fresh Air, San Francisco Chronicle, The WeekEntertainment Weeklythe Daily BeastSlate.comChristian Science Monitorthe Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the Oregonianthe Guardian, and Kirkus; and a #1 Indie Next pickAll the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.

 

drawing, reading, baking, watching

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I might be almost half done with my new font "Dear Rae". So far it has been great fun. I am using a folded nib pen, a bottle of ink and watercolour paper. I am still drawing all the characters. Right now there are about 350 in the font.

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I've been reading all the books on my library hold list. These are books I put on in 2012 and 2013. I enjoyed them all.

We are Water...In middle age, Annie Oh—wife, mother, and outsider artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy, cultured, confident Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.

Data, A Love Story...Forty million people date online each year. Most don’t find true love. Thanks to Data, a Love Story, their odds just got a whole lot better.  This book is a lively, thought-provoking memoir about how one woman “gamed” the world of online dating—and met her eventual husband.

The Good Luck of Right Now...For thirty-eight years, Bartholomew Neil has lived with his mother. When she gets sick and dies, he has no idea how to be on his own. His redheaded grief counselor, Wendy, says he needs to find his flock and leave the nest. But how does a man whose whole life has been grounded in his mom, Saturday mass, and the library learn how to fly?

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Since rhubarb and strawberries are in season I made this bread yesterday. You can find the recipe here. It is a healthier, not too sweet, bread. We liked it.

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Just finished Mad Men, on the last season of Breaking Bad and started Grace and Frankie. We both enjoyed it. 13 episodes AND it is renewed for next year.

So what have you been drawing, reading, baking or watching?

mail art #2

More Mail Art! This time it is for Crystal of Tart Workshop  so I had to bring my "A" game. These note cards are not hand printed. But these letters are from my as yet unnamed, new, big, script font. I created a few note cards, had them printed and mailed them off.

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Again this is not handlettered, but I did use 3 of my fonts to address.

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And I collaged the back of the envelope with things I had in my office. It was probably over kill. But fun to do.

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This little package of goodies went to my friend Laurie.

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And it appears I forgot to photo the actual Mail Art lettering piece that is in the envelope, which was Laurie's horoscope.

Mail Art... fun to do, even more fun to get.

what are you reading?

Screen Shot 2015-05-04 at 10.58.32 AM Screen Shot 2015-05-04 at 10.59.49 AM I just worked my way through a large stack of books. I enjoyed these two. These are 3rd and 4th in a series and I just put the first two on my library list. I liked the forensics, archeology and history and that it took place in Ireland.

False Mermaid...  Gavin remains haunted by a cold case that nearly cost her sanity five years ago: her sister Tríona's brutal murder. After failing to bring the killer to justice, Nora fled to Ireland, throwing herself into her work and taking the first tentative steps in a new relationship with Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire. She's driven home by unwelcome news: Tríona's husband—and the prime suspect in her murder—is about to remarry. Nora is determined to succeed this time, even if it means confronting unsettling secrets. As she digs ever closer to the truth, the killer zeroes in on Tríona's young daughter, Elizabeth.

The Book of Killowen... After a year away from working in the field, archaeologist Cormac Maguire and pathologist Nora Gavin are back in the bogs, investigating a ninth-century body found buried in the trunk of a car. They discover that the ancient corpse is not alone—pinned beneath it is the body of Benedict Kavanagh, missing for mere months and familiar to television viewers as a philosopher who enjoyed destroying his opponents in debate. Both men were viciously murdered, but centuries apart—so how did they end up buried together in the bog?

(Thanks Linda!)

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After reading my stack of books I am now on to the my hold list at the library which is also a lovely long list... here are some favorites.

Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . .

So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.

When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. Screen Shot 2015-05-04 at 11.19.30 AM

“Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I’ve read before. If I tell you that it’s funny, and moving, and true; that it’s as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it?”— Michael Cunningham

It’s short and funny and absorbing, an effortless-seeming downhill ride that picks up astonishing narrative speed as it goes. What’s remarkable is that Offill achieves this effect using what you might call an experimental or avant-garde style of narration, one that we associate with difficulty and disorientation rather than speed and easy pleasure.— New York Review of Books

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Imagine this: It's your birthday. The doorbell rings: No one is there. But a book is there wrapped with ribbon silvery as London's Thames River at teatime in April. Alexander McQueen might well have tied the bouffant bow.

Kathleen Tessaro's new novel, The Perfume Collector (Harper), is a mystery, a journey, which takes us from Paris in 1955, to spring in London the same year. Then we're in New York, and it's 1927! We visit Monte Carlo, England, and ah, back to Paris.

The Perfume Collector, Tessaro's striking fifth novel, is fragrant with suspense. You will learn astonishing secrets about perfumes: classic, forbidden, long lost, as memorable as this story.

Tessaro is the rare writer who defines the exact place we are. She is a fine host; you can feel her fascination as her characters arrive in each perfectly detailed scene. We first meet Eva d' Orsay in Paris. She is not having a good day. Her life has been, as we learn, a puzzle. But then Eva never showed anyone what she could do with numbers. (If she'd lived in America now she'd be running Apple). But this talent "was secret...she couldn't recall a time when numbers hadn't carved through the chaos...bringing order." - The Huffington Post

 Soooooo, what are you reading that I should put on my list? Do share.

flash sale & giveaway!

Thought I would welcome Spring with a Flash Sale and a Giveaway! It actually may be Spring in Wisconsin and that is something to celebrate. Screen Shot 2015-04-27 at 2.50.31 PM

3 fonts... Woof, Vibrant Women and Yoga Studio all for what would be the price of one font. Designed by Nancy. All for $29.

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Lake Vacation Doodles, House Doodles, Farm Doodles and Woodland Doodles. 4 for $39 by Rae.

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Crowns, Just Animals, Just People, Just Flower Pots and Just Frames. Just 5 fonts from Justine for $49.

All for a limited time. To receive Flash Sale pricing plz use the links on this page.

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This month's giveaway will be my whimsical alphabet sampler. I designed it and it is produced and sold by Ann of Stitch Supply Co. To enter the giveaway go to my Facebook page and either Like, Comment or Share. If you do all 3 you are entered 3 times, or 2 times for 2...

 

 

art + socks = bliss

 

When I was in grade school I knew who Charley Harper was. I certainly did not learn about him in my Catholic grade school art class. My uncle was a printer and each Winter on a Sunday at grandma's house we would pour over the big books of Christmas cards. Those cards were then ordered and would have our names already printed on them. I loved those books. My favorite cards were any with Charley Harper art on it. I do remember an iconic red cardinal card that I do think we sent one year. I was mesmerized by how he drew. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Harper

 

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I rarely shop. I am hard to buy for. I have what I need. I do like nice things though. And I really like toasty, warm socks. I almost always wear hand-knit socks or Smartwool socks. I even darned my favorite pair of Smartwool striped black socks. I know I do obsess over some things.

And this week I came home to this package of bliss on my doorstep. Not sure it gets much better than this. Charley Harper Smartwool socks. They are a wear now weight and a limited collection. So if you want some art for your feet check out the collection. http://www.smartwool.com/socks.html?cat=6837&gender=9915

Disclaimer: These socks were a gift from a friend (thanks Sarah!). I have no arrangement with Smartwool. I just wish I did.

 

breakfast smoothie

Time for a cold smoothie instead of a warm morning drink.

The day before.... 1. Brew coffee and put in the refrigerator. 2. Peel bananas and wrap individually in saran wrap and freeze.

To make:

I use my little Cusinart smoothie marker. (Thanks again Jen!)

In the tumbler I put... 1 c skim or 2% milk 3/4 c cold coffee 1 frozen banana chopped in pieces 1 scoop chocolate protein powder

If you want it a little sweeter add a little sugar or stevia.

If you want it a little more chocolately add a bit of Trader Joe's sipping chocolate.

Blend and enjoy!