I visited the Chinese Gardens here in Portland last weekend. It is one of my favorite places in Portland. I really need to go there more often. I think people talk about the Japanese Garden more in regards for tourists in Portland, and the Japanese Gardens are nice. But, the Lan Su Chinese Garden is such a more unique experience. I think I especially like all the open interiors - walkways, hallways, little buildings - all with pretty intricate woodwork.
There are lots of places that you can sort of hide or get out of the way.
Weekends can be kind of crowded. Weekdays off season are the best for taking some quiet time in the garden.
Today I have not been walking along pretty garden walkways like last Sunday. I've been on the computer way too long. But before I go I want you to know that I'm having a Free Shipping Sale at The Cedar Chest through Sunday the 6th.
I also just created a facebook page for The Cedar Chest. So, please check it out and "like" it if you do. I just posted a bunch on new stuff at the Etsy shop.
I love carnations. I think they are a highly under-appreciated flower. They have a lovely spicy scent and they look real friendly and pretty.
The mister and I celebrated our 8 year anniversary last week and he brought me these carnations. He has brought me many amazing beautiful flower arrangements over the years and I have loved them all. These sweet carnations are loved as much and look great in the vases I have.
Next time your at the florist or even the grocery store take a whiff of some carnations and bring them home.
October brings our anniversary and a mountain vacation. I am finally starting to feel better from my back injury. I hope your October is wonderful!
I'm kind of obsessed with the movie Bridesmaids right now. I never caught it in the theaters, so I bought it as soon as it came out., I knew I would like it and I'm already a big fan of Melissa McCarthy. I have had it for about two weeks and I've watched it 4 times since then. It is a very funny, well rounded and well done film. I love the friendship of the main characters in the movie and all the bridesmaids are just perfection.
If I had seen it earlier I would have written a big entry like this one. Melissa McCarthy almost steals that movie and you're so happy whenever she is on screen. She's the hero of the film, really. She's the one that comes through and wakes up the heroine. She is kick ass in every way. And I have totally known women kind of like her.
I think the main thing that needs to be said over and over again is that Bridesmaids is a movie with three fat characters (two are smaller rolls - the roommate and a stewardess - yes, a fat stewardess!) and there are virtually no fat jokes in the script - AND it was the blockbuster of the summer!!
Do you hear that Hollywood? Fat people were cast, were hilarious and were not used for cheap fat hating jokes - and the film was the biggest film of the summer! Please, please learn from this.
Some people might think there were some fat jokes in Bridesmaids, but they were small and subtle and and were in line with the characters. They weren't something I found offensive.
And then last week Melissa McCarthy does Saturday Night Live and kills it! I am so happy for her and her success.
I also secretly love that she has been smaller in the past, even losing quite a bit of weight at one time and yet when she really breaks through is when she's bigger. In fact, since she is so short, I don't really know if she could have been so good in the Bridesmaids roll is she'd been smaller. The character needed some physical heft to back up her personality.
I also watch her sitcom Mike and Molly where she pays a much more straight character. It's a good show, mostly. Her comic timing and reactions are just so good. Unfortunately, the mother played by Swoosie Kurtz is a mean-spirited fatphobic character and I find myself hating her and not wanting to watch Mike and Molly just for the way the mother character is written. But, my love for McCarthy wins out. She won an Emmy this year over some amazing people for her performance in the sitcom!
It is nice - finally - to have a movie like Bridesmaids prove what many of us have all been saying over the years. Fat jokes are cheap and easy and not needed for a quality film - or even a blockbuster film. Please folks, learn from Bridesmaids.
Today has been somewhat rainy and windy. Fall is now here and as usual I am happy to see it. However, I was not happy to have such early fall-like weather last weekend when the mister and I went to the coast. I was hoping for a little blast of last minute summer. I had visions of laying on the warm sand during the day and staring at the stars at night. Instead I got a grey sky that almost exactly matched the grey ocean and rain all weekend long. You couldn't even sit on the porch without getting wet.
It was still a nice weekend, though. There was lots of relaxing and one day we went into town, walked around in the rain and had some ice cream.
We also stopped by the smoked fish shop. I've driven by a few times and never could stop. We got the most amazingly good and still warm smoked tuna, salmon and black cod. I will stop there now everytime.
Karla's Smokehouse
We stayed in a kooky old run down house that hadn't been redone since the early 80's and is still filled with the owners things. The owners still come and stay there part of the year.
Down in their dark garage there's a little hallway to get to the washer and dryer area (everything else is behind plywood walls and covered in tarps). In this hallway I found a wall covered with clippings and old calendars and posters. I love finding walls like this. This one was especially exciting because the owner had a pin-up calendar from 1981 on Duane Bryers' chubby pin-up creation, Hilda. I have only ever seen these images on the internet. It was cool to see some in real life.
Everyone seems to be pretty excited about fall being here. I am already looking forward to some things. But, I'm gonna try and keep my preconceived ideas to a minimum about my plans. You never know what you'll really get.
I've been meaning to post this for about a month. And now, with the symbolic last day of summer I finally get to it. In my defense this summer, especially the last month and a half has been pretty crazy. Between visits from family, making the zine, doing the zine symposium and then for the last month dealing with a really bad back injury - I've had little time to catch up. I'm looking forward to some cooler weather and stronger days ahead.
I've posted before about my mother and her amazing talents. She has been cranking out amazing quilts for the last couple of years. She never sells her work and it drives me crazy, because her stuff is so beautiful and well done. But, it takes a lot of work to do that and I can understand her not wanting to spend time on that. She'd rather sew!
I spent a couple of weeks at the beginning of summer looking for a good lunch bag for work. I wanted Mexican oilcloth because it's easy to clean and so bright and cheery. I looked and looked on Etsy and there was nothing like what I wanted on there. I finally settled on something that wasn't what I wanted. Then I thought about my mom and how she could probably make one with her mad skills. So, I bought some oilcloth online with contrasting gingham colors. So cute! I took it to her house with a placemat I liked, too. Hoping she could make me some customer round placemats as well (I forgot to take pics of those, but trust me they're awesome).
She was pretty unsure of working with oilcloth, especially since I wanted the liner to be oil cloth, too. I knew she would be able to do it and in fact she did quickly crank out some awesome lunch bags. She made them to my specifications, which were a little bigger than I probably needed. So, I use them more for picnics. And truthfully, they are so beautiful, I've been cautious about using them at all.
In her usual fashion she added lots of sweet little features, including pockets inside and matching placemats and coasters for the bags! She used this stitch for everything and it worked great. The cool, thing about oilcloth is that you can just leave the edges cut. It won't unravel.
She took some cardboard and covered it to make the bottom more sturdy and flat. You can also remove it if you want.
I can't offer you the directions for these bags, but something even better recently came out if you like the look of these totes. A new book called Sewing with Oilcloth is now out. And you can get free patterns for the tote bag and the table runner. This book almost makes me want to sew!
One of my favorite things to buy at zine symposiums or comic shows is drawings that little kids are selling. There's usually at least one kid who's with someone selling and they have a pile of drawings or comics of their own to sell.
Last month at the Portland Zine Sympoisum there was an organization raising money for kids art classes by selling some drawings. I bought this for 2 or 3 dollars.
Here are some other drawings I got in the past, most likely from either the zine symposium or Stumptown Comicsfest. I've been meaning to post some of these for years.
This one above was a full comic series. I bought three issues, all full length and stapled in the corner. This was from at least 5 years ago at PZS.
This one above is my favorite. It looks like this on the page. The drawing takes up about 1/6 of the blank page. Here is a close up below:
Not only is this just a great picture of some kid that I am guessing has some serious braces. But, it always makes me hear a song in my head from a long ago Oakland band called Eskimo that I saw a lot in the late 80's.. They ended a song called Clark's Monkey calling out the name Clark, Clark?
These last two I think I got at Stumptown.
I'm betting I have more around. If I find them I'll post them. When you go to shows like this look for the little kids who has a mess of drawings on a small part of the table. You'll get some cool stuff.
Last weekend was the annual Portland Zine Symposium. I have attended every one and tabled at all but the first. It's a fun, tiring and inspiring weekend. It's great to see zine friends from all over the country that you see every year. Some I've known for about ten years now.
Last weekend was pretty much as described. I came away feeling more inspired about zines, even though I walked away with less in quantity than before. What I did get made a strong impression. It was very hot in the room and that made it even more exhausting. I came away from the zine symposium with some great zines which I might blog about later, a renewed love of zines and zinesters, a summer cold, a completely wrecked house and a new zine of my own.
My new zine is Paper Crush #4 and it's about collecting vintage postcards and photographs.
100 years from now there will be much less paper correspondence for people to see and learn from. Through vintage postcards and photographs you get to read words from people's every day lives from over 100 years ago. You can see images of places that may or may not still be standing.
Each Paper Crush #4 zine comes with a free vintage postcard! You can find the new zine on my Etsy shop.
If you wonder what a zine symposium is like, this video is almost as good as being there. It's kind of long, but gives you the idea. They seem to have captured almost every table there but mine, but that's okay. I got some pictures to share.
One of the things I really love about the zine symposium is the creative things that people do at their table. Sometimes it's decorations, sometimes it's free stuff they offer. This video captures a good amount of that.
This year I made little postcards and gave them away so that people could leave notes on each other's table. it was pretty fun. I should have made more.
It's the last day of July and that means only 5 more days till the Portland Zine Sympoisum! I am not nearly ready. The last few days have been spent on outings around the area since my sister is visiting. Now it's time to get this thing done. Hopefully in the next two days I can get it dialed in and copied. So, why am I blogging! Argh. I am hopeless. Well, here's some pics from the last few days around the Portland area. There were museum trips, lunches, lake picnics, kayaking and a trip out to Sauvie Island.
Today is a rainy day in Portland. Even though it's the middle of July, I don't mind. I like having some sun and then some cooler days.
Last weekend was a perfect summer weekend. On Saturday I went out to Sauvie Island and got a flat of raspberries. Kruger Farms had just posted the day before that the raspberries were in and showed a picture of buckets of raspberries. That was enough to get me there. I love any reason to go out to Sauvie Island. Below is a phone picture from inside Krugers looking out over their fields.
There were lots of people there, but plenty of raspberries and other great produce. I got a flat and some other items and then went out to the Blue Heron Herbary - one of my favorite places on the island.
The next day I went to my Mom's and we made Raspderry Jam with some of the berries. I've always been intimidated to make jam. Something about the special jars, sterilizing and pectin just seemed like a lot of work, especially when I can get super great and local jam pretty much anywhere. But, I found a recipe for Raspberry Jam that required no pectin and no special jar sterilizing and I wanted to try it.
Raspberries have natural pectin in them, so it isn't really needed when you are making raspberry jam. I learned this from the cookbook Foods to Live By, which is written by the folks who run Earthbound Farms.
I really like this cookbook and so did my mom, so I left it with her so she could try some things. Because of this, I don't have the exact recipe with me, but it was really easy and I read it over many times, so I'm pretty sure I have it committed to memory.
Basically it was this:
16 cups raspberries 8 cups sugar
Put in heavy bottom pot, bring to boil, then simmer for about 50 minutes. Spoon into any sterilized jars right away or wait to cool and put into jars.
We simmered for longer than 50 minutes because it didn't look like it was thickening. It looked more like a sauce. But, after it cooled down it did thicken up quite good, especially the ones with the seeds left in. We did some seedless and some with seeds. For seedless we put the jam through a sieve and then a strainer.
Let me tell you, it's delicious. Not too sweet and so fresh tasting.
I guess I better get back to working on my zine now. Zine Sympoisum is in a few weeks.....well, maybe I'll have a snack of toast and jam first.
