As a little treat today...a few more of my mum's beautiful photos of Africa.

A little bit of magic.

It's amazing, really it is...but I have to tell you that yet another package arrived on our doorstep with Q's name on it...this one all the way from Malta!

Q has become so delighted by the ritual of opening her presents that she now gives a little shudder and ghasp of excitement when she sees one come out of its envelope.
To her joy, this one was a rabbit... a beautiful, floppy handmade rabbit with a humorous smile, crafted by the beautiful Juniper of Capers and Olives.
The ribbon was also useful as a headband, which Q is enamoured of lately since her babysitter likes to wear them.
This bunny, with Q's name embroidered on her back under her (removable) dress now graces Q's bedtime collection, with is threatening to crowd her out of bed one of these days ;)

Thanks Juniper! Big kisses!

More bits and snatches from my mother's beautiful house.




My mother's most recent trip was to Africa (you may remember my posting some of the amazing shots) and she has been painting large pieces from her photos ever since, which lends an extra exoticism to her studio space.

When we arrived in Woodstock, M & Q were still recovering from a winter cold, so for those first couple of afternoons, they napped while I went hiking with my mum and her dog.
It was bitter cold for the first few days, but the weather was spectacularly beautiful nonetheless. Recent snows combined with broad sunshine turned the woods around Woodstock - and the Sawkill river - into a wonderland.
I am not well-suited to the East Coast climate. Long stretches of grey skies, icy paths, and the kind of biting cold that typifies and Eastern winter are difficult for me to tolerate, not to mention the mugginess, biting insects and blanketing heat of summer. So I never appreciated the East for its true beauty until long after I had moved away. Now, from a safe distance, I can appreciate it in a way I never did as a child - and I think you can see that in these pictures.
And then there are all my mother's wonderful stories. She has walked and ridden these same woods and pathways since her family moved here from Europe when she was about 10. She can tell you, for instance, that she and some of the other local kids used to gallop their horses down to the watering hole you see above, which is deep and turquoise-green in summer, and, without slowing, jump their mounts headlong off the small slate ledge into the depths of the pool, tack, clothes and all.

It feels good to be able to go back and appreciate this place where I was born though fresh, unencumbered eyes, without any shadow of the resentment and discontent of my tweenage years.
And that waterfall! Just, wow.
Fortunately by our last day in town my husband was recovered and was able to take this same walk with my mother while I watched over the napping babe. I would have felt terrible if he had missed out on all this wanton beauty.

My mother has a lovely, heavy vintage magnifying glass that she keeps at her desk. Q found it and was instantly captivated. For the rest of the day she wandered about looking at everything through the lens. She's looking at me in the top two shots, then at one of her toy mice, and finally at her dinner. Talk about having your cooking scrutinized!

ps- My husband was pointing out that I needed to post a "full length" shot of the dollhouse from the previous post, rather than just small segments of it. If you zoom in on this set and look in the top left photo here, you can see the full dollhouse from the outside. Isn't it beautiful?

Corner View: personal style


I must admit I don't have anything very serious to say about my personal style these days. I used to have all sorts of style opinions (and a wardrobe to match). But 2009 was my first year as a mother, and...well, I think we all know what that means! It also happens to be my first year running a sort of business from our home (in addition to the freelance work I've done for years now). The combination of motherhood, my stubborn refusal to use daycare, and working during every spare minute (nap time, bedtime) that I can filch in my studio...let's just say I spend a lot of time in my pajamas.

When I do have a rare (rare!) opportunity to actually get dressed, I enjoy it. But, lacking the time to be terribly inventive, I have retreated to the classics for the most part. Good jeans. A cashmere sweater (which I enjoy finding at resale stores), a classic trench. Most of the contents of my closet haven't seen the light of day in over two years.

But here's the other thing...for the bulk of my life, up until just a few years ago, I lived a sort of nomadic life. My parents had lived this way since they met and, having an only child, they were able to continue with me in tow. They were not (as most people assume) either hippies, jet-setters, or military. This is just what they liked to do. They were at least functionally multi-lingual and well-traveled. They loved to roadtrip and were comfortable in a variety of environments. They lived lightly and were always ready to pack up and move for the sake of a new horizon. For me, this was a lifestyle in which I found myself at birth, so it was not just second nature but, really, first nature. I felt safe and secure on the road. I enjoyed the transitions, and my own ability to shape-shift from one environment to another. It felt like my greatest strength, and I relied on it. If I felt insecure or unhappy in my life at any point, my immediate reaction was to move, the farther the move and the greater the change of environment, the better. It was almost like shedding a skin and growing a new one, just as sleek and snug and supple as the first, but entirely different.

So it is that I have always been captured by those moments in spy novels or films where a character goes under cover, sheds all signs of previous identity and takes on an entirely new persona. The idea of stepping into an anonymous motel room with a drug store sack containing hair dye, scissors, new sunglasses and a change of clothes, tossing all possessions in a dumpster, and walking out a new person with nothing to lose....ah. Forget your romance novel formulas, your happily-ever-afters. If there's a fantasy for me, that's it.

Of course, I effectively gave up that lifestyle when I got married, became the owner of a lovely home, and brought home our amazing, magical, mercurial child - at least for practical purposes. Lest you fear for my stability, don't worry - I married the one man who will happily buy a pair of drugstore shades, step into a strange motel room with me, and spend the week on the road heading wherever the highway takes us. The one man who would sleep in the desert with me for days on end, washing in streams and waterfalls and never minding the sand in our teeth and the dust in our hair. The one man with whom I could have happily traveled through vastest China on the way to adopting a child we'd never met.

So for this personal style moment, I give you my form of escapism: a pair of cheap shades, a false set of reading glasses, a faux ponytail... Hey presto - I'm a new person for the day. Even if, these days, it's only for the space of a trip to the coffee shop ;)

For more Personal Style moments from bloggers around the globe, stop by Jane's and browse through the list.

For a girl who started out averse to any sort of lip contact (due, no doubt, to living a year in a crowded orphanage with an open cleft, and then several months of surgeries and recoveries) the Q has really taken to kissing of late. In the months after her second surgery last April, she had a lot of very tight scar tissue binding the upper lip, which made it difficult to pout like this. But she has since loosened up and gained, as you can see, full mobility. This newly-discovered kissy face is a useful tool, which she uses to tempt, cajole, manipulate, and even dismiss people (she uses this liberally at the end of a social evening when she's ready to pack up and go home. She will gladly kiss and hug everyone in the room, friend and stranger alike, if it will get her on the road back to her bed. She also of course, as on this occasion, uses it simply to dole out affection to her "people", when she is feeling generous. This face, needless to say, is my undoing. Every ounce of steely-cold will in me turns to lukewarm mint jelly under the spell of this face. This is a face that could, dare I say, quite literally launch a thousand ships.

Photos taken after a superb breakfast at a friend's restaurant in Woodstock, Oriole9.

I may have posted about this artist before, but I am just blown away by the exquisite classical beauty of this illustration by Rachel's Cabinet. Her work is of that rare quality that harks back to another era of high craftsmanship in the form of pure art.

A small intermission from NY photos...Oh, how I love the blog community!! So many talented people with such generous and outreaching hearts! There are few things I value more in this life at the moment than all things handmade. When we returned from vacation, we found a package on our stoop from the sweet and multi-talented Guusje in Holland. Many of you are probably already acquainted with the pleasures of her blog, which just radiates happiness and family love. A little bit of that happiness and love came Q's way in the form of a hand-knitted, Q-sized shoulder bag with beautiful wooden buttons, and a (much coveted by me ;) dragon t-shirt! I just loved Guusje's wonderful dragons, and was so excited to have one to add to Q's wardrobe!

Thank you and many little Q kisses to you, Guusje! You always make me smile.

New in the shop....Edna's Sense of Gravity, 8x10 print

...and ANNOUNCING JANUARY SALES!

We're back, and it's time for some uplifting January madness! Through the end of the month, I will be offering FOUR 8x10 prints for price of two. Purchase two prints from the 8x10 collection, and choose two more for free! At time of purchase, just mention which two additional prints you'd like in your message to the seller.

ALSO:

We'll be offering a promotion on limited edition giclee prints. Buy one signed giclee print from the limited edition collection and get two 8x10 prints of your choice for free! Again, just mention which two additional 8x10 images you'd like at the time of purchase.

Remember my bunny house, and the magical story of the doll houses that my parents built?

Well...here's the original. The first. Hewn from the trunk of a massive pine that fell across our road during one tumultuous, stormy winter's night when I was small. My father cut it into segments in the morning, removed the debris from the road, and hauled the best piece home to his studio. He cut down the branches, sliced off one side, and carved out the insides. He chiseled the stubs of the branched into windows and cut out arched doorways. He built balconies from plywood, and ladders from stained and sanded scrap.
Mike and I hauled it down from my mother's pristine attic, where it has nestled among the stacks that store both my parents' paintings from over the decades. She brought down two neatly labeled boxes of doll house furniture and, much the worse for wear but still achingly beautiful (more on that in a later post) the miniature dolls that originally inhabited it. In place of some of the more fragile and time-worn pieces, my mother bought Q a family of rabbits to take occupancy of the tree house.

An instant hit, as you can imagine.
The curtains (hand sewn by my mother) are dusty, the ribbons falling down from their original swags. The handmade rugs are curled and tattered with age and loving use. The tiny silk flowers and moss that originally decorated the outside of the tree are crumbled and grey, some torn away by tiny fingers, some simply disintegrated with light and time. But the main structure of this fabulously-conceived piece holds true and strong. The walls are as polished, glowing and beautifully-carved as ever, the three floors so solid that, in spite of its massive weight, you can carry it by them without a single nail easing loose. The wheels still roll, the balconies are straight and true, and the roof - raised just a bit and slanted front to back, in a nod to modern architecture, on pegs in order to leave a sort of modernist clerestory at the top of the house - is still flush and sturdy.
Look at the perfect, regular marks of my father's chisel in the arch of that doorway, in the chute of that window. My father, born so poor that he lived in a one-room, dirt-floor shack with his parents and 11 surviving siblings, went on to be the valedictorian of his highschool class, in spite of the fact that English was not his first language. Following that, he won, in his 20s, a prestigious spot as one of the government-sponsored WPA artists who decorated government buildings throughout the Midwest with his spectacular historical murals, and later a Fulbright grant, and places in many of the world's most prestigious museums as well as the Library of Congress. Trained only as an apprentice to a prominent artist of the time, he was also a self-taught architect who designed and built from the ground up one of the houses we lived in during my childhood.
It's no wonder, then, that this miniature oeuvre is such an enduring work of art, design and construction. It feels like a posthumous honor to him, then, to see the next generation of our family enjoying the work of love that he created for me one long, cold winter's day when I was small.
This one's for you, Papa. I hope you are somewhere beautiful watching this now and listening to my loving words. OX - Your MaiTai.

Woodstock, and my mother's house in winter.