post thanksgiving

Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. I never participate in going to stores on Black Friday, but I do have my own little post-Thanksgiving rituals I observe. Right now I am watching Home for the Holidays, a movie I often watch after Thanksgiving. A great film. I recommend it.

I also break out the Christmas Journal and start my lists for Christmas. I love having a Christmas Journal. Follow that link to find out more about that.

Last week I got back from a sweet little trip to a nice river view cabin near Mt Hood. The first night we were there we got snow. It was perfect.

I was totally entertained taking flash pictures in the snow. The other worldly mist could be actual fog, my own breath or a snowflake right in front. Any ideas?

All night long I kept getting woken up to loud thuds of snow hitting the roof. In the morning this is what I got to see:

It was a wonderful vacation. I hope you enjoy the rest of your Thanksgiving weekend. Next up, Christmas! I can't believe how fast it's come.

printables for christmas

Maybe this Christmas you are funds poor but rich in ideas and a color printer. Then luck is on your side! Lots of neat designers out there design free items that you can print out yourself. It's the perfect inexpensive (and last minute) gift.

Here are a few to get you started:

This Owl Lover 2011 Calender is making the rounds and seems to pretty popular, and why wouldn't it be? It's a calender, it's owls - and best yet you get to choose which owl art you want with each month. I really like that part. You can choose from 30 images!

There's a nice selection of some neat little boxes you can make for your homemade food gifts or whatever else you may need to box up.

Maybe you might want to print up some of your family recipes to share with a friend. Here's a neat way to create them for a pretty presentation. Recipe Card Maker.

I love these adorable bookplates you could print out for someone. Bookplates from Orange You Lucky.

Got some neat old bottles or boxes? These labels would make a really neat presentation. Vintage Flowery Labels, and Vintage Luggage Labels.

Hope these give you some ideas. I'll try and be back with more before Christmas.

the perfect fall outing

Yesterday the mister and I went out for a fall drive for my birthday outing. I've been on this drive a number of times, but it never gets old. The fall is the best time to go.

We took the Old Columbia Highway from Troutdale to Multnomah Falls. The drive is winding and beautiful.

The Lodge at Multnomah Falls is always such a pretty sight.

Inside it's so cozy with a high windows with a view of the trees and the falls. The food is great, too. I had tomato bisque soup with the trout dinner. Delish.

The falls are of course beautiful and the colors all over were so beautiful and saturated. In the shallow waters of the stream near the parking lot we got to see salmon spawning. Right there in front of us, they were jumping around and making quite a spectacle in the shallow waters. It was really neat to see.

By the time we left it was almost dark and it was raining, but the falls still looked so beautiful I couldn't stop taking pictures.

It was a lovely day and capped off three days of birthday fun. If you want to see some vintage postcards of Multnomah Falls take a visit to my other blog The Cedar Chest.

pin it

These days they call them inspiration boards, but I call them bulletin boards. I have always had more than one, even when I was in my teenage room and mostly tacking up pictures from Tiger Beat and Seventeen.

Now at the age of 46 (well, 46 next week) I have many in my craft den and one big one in my bedroom. Sometimes I feel odd about that. Like I haven't grown up. But, as much as I love little pieces of paper and design, not to mention souvenirs - how could I not have several boards?

I find even so many beautiful images on the internet. I mean it really is endless, isn't it? When I find something so beautiful or inspiring or stunning I want to save it, but often all I can do is just save the blog post or article.

So, as you can imagine I was pretty happy to find Pinterest. It's an online personal inspiration board and you can create many different boards. If you know how much I love a theme (and I kind of think you do) then you know how much I love that.


You can also follow other people's boards and see what they are pinning. It's pretty great. The only thing that would make it better is if you could see a larger version of the image with just a hover over the pic. Maybe they are working on that.



Above is a screen shot of one of my boards. You can see my boards here and follow me if you want. I don't have too many as I have just started. I really love the boards that my friend Jenny does. Maybe I'll see you on Pinterest. Looking forward to seeing your boards.

summer to fall

Like many people, I love fall. I wonder if it really is the most popular season or if I just tend to be friends with people who like fall best.

I love the season for the reason most people do, but also because the fall brings a number of celebrations including my birthday and anniversary.

Here are some pictures from the last month. The end of summer to the first few weeks of fall. The days here are still pretty warm, but the nights are getting cold. Unlike the eastern states our tress aren't brilliant yet, but the leaves are changing.

Here's a pic of my bag from the last farmers market of the season. Included inside is: goat cheese from Dee Creek Farms, jam from Packer Orchards and Bakery and kombucha from Oregon Kombucha.

A pic from a lovely night in a friend's backyard when the nights were still warm- just a couple weeks ago.

The anniversary card to my mister (do you see the pumpkin shaped cake in the background?). I got this awesome letterpress bear cut out from Blackbird Letterpress. And then I made the little card to fit inside his paws. The card is one of the most important things to me when it comes to celebrations. I love them. My cards seem to be getting smaller and smaller. I made one that was about 3" x 2" for Valentines Day.

Here is what I did with some of the flowers that I got for our anniversary. I got this vase for about 3 dollars at a garage sale I went to a few weeks ago. They had tons of beautiful vintage ceramics. This is from West Coast Pottery of California. I love seeing flowers in it.

The wood hummingbird is new to my house as well. It was something in our house when I was a kid and my mom recently asked if I wanted it. It'd been in storage about 20 years, so it's neat to see it again and have it in my house.

I hope you are enjoying the fall so far. What's your favorite season?

sand, sea, september

I took such a huge amount of photos on the trip I took last month to the Oregon Coast. I think the volume of them is what made me put off editing them, choosing them, uploading them and making this entry. But, I definitely wanted to because I had a wonderful time and they're so pretty.

I love this one of my friend Chelsea walking out to the beach.

You can see the whole folder full on my flickr page, but here are my faves.

I hadn't spent much time in Rockaway Beach before. It was nice to be on a new beach and in a new town. Rockaway Beach is very typical old style tourist beach town. It's not posh at all. There is a strip with the usual beach shops - fudge, kites, souvenirs, salt water taffy.

I realized on this trip that the reason all beach towns have the same kind of shops is because that is the only time you buy fudge, salt water taffy or fly a kite and so doing things kind of reinforces that you are indeed on vacation. It's a ritual.

And I did it too. I ate fudge, I wrote a couple postcards (even if one was to myself), I got smashed pennies, I went to the souvenir shop and I bought a kite and a cedar box.

There must be other people besides me who love cedar boxes, especially the souvenir kind. It can't all be 12 year old girls buying them at the tourist shops. I actually haven't bought myself one since I was a kid, but I always think about them and desire them. Why haven't I let myself just get one before this, I have no idea. I do have a few people have given me. The smell sooo good.

The house my friend and I were staying at had not been changed since the 70s'. It was filled with magazines from the early 80's. The decor was both kooky and cool. This climbing plant was growing through the ceiling and was even coming through in the other room. It was a little creepy. Despite this, we both felt really comfortable there. The super close proximity to the beach was perfect.

One day we went into town and heard a steam engine come though. We went to investigate and found out that it was a scenic train that went from Wheeler to Garibaldi and we could get on if we wanted to.

So, we got our ticket and hopped on. There was a old train car from the 40's, a partially open air train and an all open air train. We rode outdoors and took lots of pictures.

We got one good day of sun and I had a lovely day in the dunes, feet in sand, staring at the clouds, singing songs to myself, playing with grass reeds and flying a kite. It was perfect.

There was good food (we made it all, Rockaway Beach is not the best for good food - groceries or restaurants), sunsets, walks, sits, exploring relaxing and pretty much all you would want plus a old timey train ride. Pretty nice.

an alternative oktoberfest celebration

It's Oktoberfest time! It seems that what everyone loves about Oktoberfest celebrations is the crowded parties, the massive drinking, the dancing and the meat.

I love Oktoberfest and yet I don't really like any of those things. Don't get me wrong, I love a good beer or two, but since they mostly make me want to curl up on the coach or take a nap, dancing around to loud music with a crowd of people is not something I'm probably going to do - drunk or not.

Another main reason I don't go to Oktoberfest celebrations is that I don't eat meat. It is pretty hard to find a veggie sausage at a German celebration. I don't really understand why, either. It would be so easy to just offer veggies sausages.

When the mister and I were in the Bavarian themed town of Leavenworth, Washington a few years ago they had one place that had veggie sausages. We ate there twice. I absolutely love a veggie sausage with mustard and sauerkraut!


Most German food, like Potato salad and other things, also has pork in it. So, that leaves that out for me, too. What's a German food loving veggie to do?

Put on your own Oktoberfest!


Mine is just for the mister and me. It features veggie sausages in buns with the toppings, German potato salad (I've made it in the crock pot before, mostly just potatoes and vinegar - good!), pretzels (can be made or bought from the local German Bakery), cucumbers in vinegar or salad, pickles and good German beer.

You can get Oktoberfest decorations from the local party store. I try and make the table look like a table in a bier garten. The final touch is some good old fashioned German music. I just find some on the internet and play it over the laptop.

This may seem pretty dorky to you - and it is - but we like it.

It reminds me of being in Leavenworth, which I loved. And it is a fun way to celebrate Oktoberfest without all the other stuff that although can sometimes sound fun - is just not really my style most of the time. I do love the German music and the Bavarian aesthetic. Maybe someday someone will start offering more veggie items at Oktoberfest celebrations.

Whether you are celebrating big or small - Happy Oktoberfest and welcome Autumn!

new issue of imaginary life now available

The first part of this week I was at a wonderful beach house on the Oregon coast. A proper post about the trip coming soon. I am going through the huge amount of pictures I took of the the sky and ocean right now.

In the meantime, I finally got Imaginary Life #7 listed on Etsy. Here it is. More info about the zine on the listing.

mcclure it

I just got an email from Buy Olympia telling me that the new Nikki McClure calender is out for 2011. That reminded me that I kind of wanted to write about the Nikki McClure catalogs and what you do with them when they are done.

As you probably know, they are beautiful. Each page is a gorgeous paper cut layout celebrating the simple pleasures in life. Usually the calender is worked into them in a way that makes it pretty unattractive to extricate it from the image thus making it difficult to cut out the calender and just hang it on the wall (she does sell wall prints now of many of the images). Yet, the images are so beautiful it is impossible to throw them away.



So, I save them and put them with my wrapping paper and use them for wrapping gifts sometimes. I also recently used some old pages to line a drawer.



Lining a drawer is an interesting thing. It seems like such a old fashioned kind of thing to do and I never really thought it was that big of a deal, and yet I will often do it, just out of some domestic tradition. This particular drawer I had not lined and I wish I had as a bottle of lotion got loose and damaged the wood. See, that is why you should line drawers! So, I did with the Nikki McClure pages.

These pages would also be nice to use for scrapbooks. You couldn't use the whole thing of course, but little pieces like leaves or something would be nice.

What do you do with your old lovely calenders?

print is not dead

This last weekend I spent both days inside a musty university gym sitting behind a table along with about 200 other people, also sitting behind a table. Sometimes we got up and walked around and looked at each other's goods. We chatted with people we haven't seen in a long time or people we have only met online and we chatted with the folks who came in just to look at our little handmade pieces of paper. I love those people.

This last weekend was the 10th annual Portland Zine Sympoium. I have been to all ten. I have tabled at all but one. I am guessing it sounds like a pretty boring time as I have outline above, but it is pretty fun. There are so many people I see there that I only see once a year, even ones who live in town! You get to show off and sell your zines and get inspired by and trade for other people's zines.It is pretty awesome to be in a room of a bunch of people who get what drives you and why you spend your time making these little booklets. Most friends and family don't get it, so to be in a room full of those people is pretty incredible.
Here is a picture of my haul:



And my table:


The new Imaginary Life is done, but not listed yet. I will hopefully get that up soon.

Support the arts! Buy some zines! You can virtually browse the zine symposium by checking out the links for all the tablers that were there on the pdxzines site.