Papaver Studio

movin' on over to wordpress!

2011-11-29T15:26:00.001-08:00

hey all, I know I haven't exactly been the most communicative blogger in the last year. I mean, my last post was in JULY? Really? Well, perhaps times are a'changin'!

I hadn't been all that energized this past year to be self employed. The economy sucked, business was HARD, and sharing my studio space with a friend who was supposed to have a different schedule than me, but then turned out to be around all the time after all (no fault of hers, its just that the best laid plans and all that) lead me to a lackluster year of crafting.

But my house projects are done for the season (hello rain!) and my studio is 100% my own again, and I'm feeling like getting my craft back on!

I'm not sure what i will be making. For sure I'll be putting energy back into Tigerpup Embroidery. Papaver Jewelry is being downscaled to just the Bottlecap Line, and the bestsellers of that line at that. Only things I wanna make, nothing that's to time consuming, cause I have other things I want to do!

It's been a year of weddings, and wedding crafting. First my best friend's wedding, I designed the cake toppers and I LOVED doing that. I'm feeling like custom cake toppers would be a fun way to move. Also decorative stuff.... So many ideas are swirling that i need to take a step back and figure out what is feasible...

So big changes around here, there's gonna be a new version of PapaverStudio.com, with some new goodies on it, and the new papaverstudio.wordpress.com!

Go there, and keep reading!

Thanks, Maggie

Webpage move!

2011-07-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

Just a quick note to say that the Papaver Jewelry website/URL is closing! But don't fear, you can find the exact same site at www.papaverstudio.com, just click on the "papaver jewelry" link on the main page.

My brother (aka, tech support) has spent months trying to get them to lower the price of my jewelry webpage, which was bought and built years ago, in the age before the six dollar a month webpage. For whatever reason, we can't get the price down, and I see no point in paying for it anymore!

In the coming months there may be more changes here, as my life moves in a different direction than it had been. More working on the house and at the job, less time and energy for jewelry production! I'm still working out what I want to do, but I will figure it out!

Thanks, Maggie

Chicken coop remodel.

2011-05-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

With two new chickens that will soon be added to the flock (pictures below), it was time to remodel the chicken coop. They needed a second story to their henhouse. So the above picture is of the henhouse with the top pulled off, it was a one story house, which fit five birds snugly. They mostly spent their nights sleeping outside of the house on the roof and the perch next to the roof. I got tired of cleaning bird poop off the top of the house (nasty), so I decided I needed to just make the house go all the way up to the roof of the coop!

The thing is being built entirely out of scrap wood in my yard, and a large glass window. Its nice to finally use up some of the random wood scraps piled up in my back yard for something other than firewood! Thats as far as I got today, shown below. I have three sides and the ceiling attached, I just ran out of daylight before I could get to the final fourth side. But thats okay, its a warm night and the girls like to sleep outdoors anyway!

Svetlana and Winnifred are both getting antsy to move into the big house. They are about half the size of the adult chickens, but I think I may let them out in the next week or so from their little pen into the big one. I worry that they will get picked on, cause they will, thats just how chickens are!

Check out Svetlana's hairdo, its amazing.

And Winnifred was very curious about the camera, as you can see here:

She really is adorable, I promise!

Maggie

Fresh Patterns out at stores now!

2011-05-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

If you are in the Portland area, I've restocked Fabric Depot and Twisted (okay, so Twisted will be restocked sometime this week, but it will be soon!). And I've been added to a new store about to open in Belfast Maine! It sounds intriguing, and I'm excited to have my patterns be in the store! Sadly, I can't remember what the name of it will be, and if thats because I forgot (shame on me!), or if she forgot to tell me in the email I don't know! I'm sure I'll find out though, when she re-orders.

So go out and get some! I'm going to be working on embroidering up some dish towels with my new "fifties chickies" on them. When I delivered the order to Fabric Depot I sort of did some shopping too and got a couple yards of some very cool dish cloth material.

Around the little Urban Farm here things are flourishing. The new duck Sammie is-I think-almost done growing. We also think he may in fact be a "he," and I think I am happy about that. Perhaps there will be some baby mixed-breed ducks next year. Sam and Lou Lou seem to be making friendly overtures, so we'll see.

The turkey is getting bigger, and its head is getting redder. I don't think I will get a white bird again next year, they look permanently bedraggled out there in my chicken pen. The young chickens are outside as well, they are in the duckhouse and run, next to the other ladies to get them used to each other, but safe from being pecked to death. I think they need to be a bit larger before I turn them loose.

In the garden, all my five different squash seeds that I potted up in the greenhouse sprouted. Along with some bush beans, marigolds, sunflowers, borage, and corn. I'm pretty excited because most of those seeds have spent at least two years in the back of my refrigerator, and I wasn't sure they would germinate. and they did, ALL of them. I'm being ruthless with my volunteer sunflowers too, because last year I wasn't and while I had a very nice sunflower patch, I didn't have much of anything do well! So this year, I'm pulling them out with my eyes closed, because I hate taking them out!

What? a new embroidery freebie?!

2011-04-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

Check it out! I got all inspired to work on my website and well, my business (sorry business, I've been busy and not paying you the attention you deserve!) and well, I made a new freebie! It's been FAR to long.

So enjoy the Keep Portland Weird freebie. Yes, it is very much inspired by the bumper stickers, I have one on my own car. I want one of the " keep portland beered" stickers too, but Jonah says its his turn to put some stickers on the car. Sigh, sharing.

I think I'm going to put this on an old T-shirt to give it some new life. There are three sizes for your embroidery pleasure. Make something!

Maggie

17 creatures and counting....

2011-03-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

When you already have two adults (me and ann), a toddler (Ayla), three dogs (two large and mine, one small and Ann's), a cat, five chickens and one duck, living in one house, what else do you need? Oh, I know! More birds! And perhaps, a male human! We need to balance out the male to female ratio a bit, being as all we have in the house right now are two neutered male dogs.

So about two weeks ago we added in some birdies. The living room is now the temporary residence of one white broad breasted turkey (Turkaloo), A crested duck of some sort (Sammie), A Polish Crested chicken (Svetlana), and an adorable little Transylvanian Naked-Neck chicken named Winnifred.

In the picture below you can't see her little wrinkly bald neck, but thats Winnie in the front, with Svetlana in the back. You can see Svet's fluffy Russian looking crest though! It will end up a big, crazy feather Afro when she grows up!

And Sammie and Turkaloo are buds. They all are really, but Sammie grows about one Winnifred every day, so she is rapidly becoming to big to hang out very well with the others. And she is so clumsy, when she flips over on her back, she can't turn back over, her wings are too tiny!

And this is our last addition to the house, Jonah! As you can see, we have a little bit of space for him, somewhere under all the dogs. He'll be moving in in a few weeks, so I am having fun going through my stuff (tackling the attic today!) and getting rid of things so that perhaps some of his stuff will fit. And yes, we will be finding storage space for alot of it until my housemates move sometime later this year!

So for now that's seventeen creatures, with one more coming! Good thing Jonah doesn't have any of his own pets to bring with him...

Home Depot Paint Sales Associate, thats me!

2011-03-01T07:50:00.000-08:00

So, a few weeks ago I gots me a job. As some of you might know, I want to be an electrician someday. I know, sort of random change from Jewelry and Embroidery pattern maker, but well, I'd like to pay the billz while making art, and art just wasn't cutting it on its own anymore in this economy. As you also might know, I am sort of obsessed with home projects, and so becoming a residential electrician seemed like a good idea! I like crawling around in attics, I like making homes more useful, and I'm not scared (anymore) of electricity!

But well, getting into the electrician's union and becoming an apprentice takes time, and I needed money now! And so I applied at the Home Depot's online application thingy. And a short and crazy week later, I had a job as a Paint Associate! Paint!? How perfect! I LOVE paint! So many colors.... so many things to paint....

And its fun. Ya know, as much fun as a joby job can be. The people there are all super nice (sorta freaky nice, but in a good way), the store is HUGE and full of things I want to buy, and there are all those paint chips.

It turns out that I like customer service, which is something I never really thought of before. I mean, I've worked CS jobs all my life, but I never really thought about it, ya know? But I like solving peoples problems, and I like educating folks about stuff. And here I get to solve their home improvement problems and learn about how to fix my own stuff and its great! I don't want to work here for the rest of my life or anything, but for a part time, hold me over til the electrician thing happens thing, it is perfect.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post: I am resigning from the Saturday Market. Thats right, no more weekends sitting in a tent outdoors for me! After eight years, some great, some not so, I am done. I emailed off my resignation yesterday. You see, Home Depot people have to work weekends too. But on the up side, its for a max of eight hours (instead of the ten or so at the market), get lunch breaks, and can request time off! Good deal. Of course, on a nice weekend I don't make as much money, but I'll take it for now!

My website is still up and running, you can still order from me there! You can also find my jewelry at Splurge on NE Fremont and 14th street, along with pins at Made In Oregon stores. I'm not going away, I'm just changing things up a bit!

Oh, and I'm picking up some new baby chicks on friday.

Maggie

Goodbye little Milton.

2011-02-16T18:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I came home around noon to discover that I was missing a duck. I wasn't too concerned because they wander around, but Milton rarely leaves his Lou Lou un-attended, so I figured something was up. He wasn't back by the time the birds were locked up for the night either, and I kinda figured that he was gone. But it was weird, because Ann said she had seen him poking around at ten that morning, and I got home at noon, and he wasn't there. I looked around the yard some today, and that's when I found Opal playing around with something red. Gross. I told her to drop it, she did, and I picked it up. I think it is some sort of duck organ, but I don't know what.

I think the poor guy was taken by a hawk. That's my guess because it happened during the day, and there isn't anything in the yard. No feathers, or feet, or anything! Just some organ that I think a bird might not find to appetizing.

Now poor Lou Lou is all alone. I'm thinking of getting her a new duck friend. The ducks and the chickens aren't exactly friends, they are more like housemates. They get along, but they don't hang. She looks rather forlorn out there all alone. Now I have to decide if I want to get a full grown duck, or raise one! Any suggestions?

Here are a few pictures I rounded up of Milton (back then he was Millie, cause we thought he was a she) as a duckling. Marcus found them fascinating back then, he would watch them take their daily baths and make sure they didn't drowned, and then lick them dry when they got out. Such a sweet guy.

Goodbye Milton, you are missed.

Gardening!

2011-01-29T18:36:00.000-08:00

Hi All!

The weather has been dry for a few days here in normally rainy January, which inspires all us Northwest gardeners to kick the dry mud off our rubber boots and get outside and see whats going on.

And I'm so glad that I did! Last weekend while waiting for dinner to cook (Jonah does the cooking, I do the waiting, its awesome) I started planning this year's garden. I started with some seed catalogs with pretty pictures, and moved onto veggie garden diagrams. Jonah got into it too, getting excited about the approximately million different varieties of tomatoes a person could grow. He wants a Brandywine, I said as long as the tomatoes actually GROW this year, I don't care what kind they are! Last year was a sad sad one for gardeners in Oregon. A mere handful of tasteless, pathetic tomatoes.

I got in the garden for a few hours on Thursday, after my wonderful dad and I (hi dad!) installed a new starter in my Subi. It was so pretty outside I almost couldn't stand it! I mostly just cut things back and threw out random decaying garden art, but it felt GOOD.

Today I got back out there, but this time I was armed with my garden plan that I came up with this morning. I knew what I wanted to move, and where (mostly). It felt great to get a bed cleared out, and everything happy in their new places.

One of the things I am most excited about (and most nervous about) was moving my hops plant. I had planted it two years ago on the trellis that held my espaliered pear trees because I had run out of room elsewhere. It was a stopgap measure, and I was going to move it last spring, but well, once a hops starts growing it doesn't stop, and it got going before I got around to moving it. So it stayed were it was planted, and grew HUGE, and threatened to take over the pears. It grew from the trellis into the nearby sunflowers, it attacked people as they got out of cars, and it produced three gallon bags worth of hop flowers. It was amazing.

I noticed that had started budding new shoots out of the ground already. So I decided to take the plunge, and dig it up! The roots spread in three feet in all directions. I had to trim it back, I hope the root pruning doesn't make it too unhappy. Also, some of those roots had budded, so I've planted them along the side of the greenhouse in the hopes that they also grow. We'll see. I just hope I didn't kill it!

So yeah, I'm really excited for the garden this year. I have the feeling that its gonna be good! Also, teaching an interested and untrained boyfriend in the arts of vegetable maintenance will be fun!

Fifties Chickies Pattern!

2011-01-03T16:43:00.001-08:00

In my last post (which was from this morning, I believe) I mentioned feeling inspired. Well, this is what I made today, a brand new pattern for brand new 2011! Yes, I know, they are more chickens, but there is an owl there too, and a couple ducks! I just love me some chickens.

These images were inspired by a book from the fifties, full of images for you to get crafty with. Including how to get all those crazy sprayed textures and looks you see everywhere at the goodwill. I started hopping up and down when I found this book last summer. Its the holy grail of fifties design images. I kept flipping the pages saying to myself "I've see this one before, and that one on a wooden bowl, and this one on a lamp, and oh! is that how they do that?" Very exciting stuff.

So yeah, I'm going to embroider the hen and rooster from the top on something, perhaps starting today. I did sign up for fun-a-day pdx, which is a month long art project where you work on it every day for a month. I will embroider every day this month! It might not be a finished work when I am done, but its a good start to a new year!

Maggie

Happy New Year!

2011-01-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

May 2011 be the best year yet!

Already the weather has been sunnier, and I've started work on some new embroidery patterns for Tigerpup. I'm feeling inspired, which is I suppose, what the new year is all about. Its all about new beginnings, and starting fresh. I've got a great feeling about this year!

Maggie

Merry Christmas Everyone!

2010-12-24T11:43:00.001-08:00

Its an old picture, but a good one, Cassady under some undecorated Christmas Trees. Happy Holidays everybody, hope you are all spending it with people you love, and can stand! If not (as in, you can't stand them, but still love them) hope you have fun making fun of them behind their backs!

We'll be hosting my family and Jonah's at my place this year for dinner. We are gonna make a Roast, and lentil soup, and drink lots of homebrew, and probably some Whiskey. I may even put on White Christmas, for an impromtu sing-along (by me and my mom, mostly).

We'll also be hosting my dog-niece Ruby, who often joins us for the holidays since her dad's family is out of town. So my house will be full of dogs and family, just the way I like it!

So Merry Christmas everyone, and Happy New Year too!

Its been how long since my last post?

2010-12-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

Really? Thats just embarrassing. I mean, I've been busy, but I think mostly when I do get a chance to poke around on the computer I've been on that dang Facebook! Who knew I'd turn into such a convert to something that I thought I'd never even sign up on?! Oh well, I also thought I'd never get a DVD player or a cell phone....

So, this post will be sort of a round up of what I've been up to in the past month and a half, starting with: The Turkey! Below is a picture of Turkelton with Martha and Henrietta, who are both probably very happy to not have been born meat birds. They are egg birds. I did manage to make good with my promise to myself to allow Turkelton to be made into the friend's Thanksgiving day dinner. She was a sweet bird in personality, and a tasty bird to eat. I really recommend raising your own Turkey someday, its an amazing experience, and I will do it again next year!

And, in case you were wondering, it really is more humane to kill and eat your turkey than to keep it as a pet, because the breed of turkey that Turkelton was was created to be eaten. Which means they grow to full eating size in under six months, and most likely if left to continue on, may become to big to walk. Not a real good life for a bird huh? But in the six months I had her she had a great life. She was pretty much free-range, got to eat all sorts of interesting things, had bird friends, got stuck on the greenhouse (and then fell off it), and got pet by tons of people.

Below is a picture of a couple of the twenty people that got to enjoy Turkelton on Friendsgiving day. Iris did an amazing job of cooking the turkey, and Senna and Forrest did a great job killing and cleaning her, and they learned alot in the process! Thanks guys!

Moving on in the month, we made beer! Jonah and I made a couple of dark winter ales for christmas presents. An Old Style ale, and an India Black Ale. We just tried both this weekend (cause they are all finished at this time) and they are delicious! Not sure we can part with them now... They were the first recipes I tried off the internet, and I am SO glad they turned out! They were a big hit at his birthday gathering this weekend. And yes, we are wearing chicken aprons.

His band Sudden Anthem (check out their myspace page to hear them!) played at East Burn on the 4th of December. We had a nice big table of friends there to hear them play for the first time. Iris graciously went up and took this picture for me, so I didn't look like a total crazy girlfriend taking pictures of her boyfriend's band. Nice of her.

Hmm, seems this is a pretty Jonah-themed post. Here he is reading my FAVORITE christmas story to my housemate Ayla and my dog. Christmas comes to monster mountain. Its about count dracula kidnapping santa so he can win an election, and a teddy bear who saves him and brings christmas to the mountain. and dracula wins the election, btw.

So, yay Christmas! I am looking forward to it so much! Think its gonna be the best one ever! Happy holidays everybody!

Maggie

Rainy weekend

2010-10-24T14:27:00.000-07:00

Yay! The rain is finally here! I will probably be less happy about it once Thursday rolls around and I am stuck outside building something in the rain for my Pre-apprenticeship program, but well, for now, I am a happy camper.

I skipped the Saturday market to paint my dining nook mint green. Its bright and cheery, and I adore it. It is a smidge more intense than I was going for, but who cares! Its clean and happy. I spent most of the day washing all the things that live up on the wrap around shelf in there first. Cause well, its a kitchen and so things up there get that awesome goopy dust that is such a pain to get rid of. Then the walls and ceiling and floor got washed. I think you could eat off any surface in that room right now.

Jonah helped me paint it green. He seemed to enjoy it for the most part! He hadn't painted anything since he was a kid, and I guess the experience left something to be desired. After a few pointers from me he was off and painting. I'm gonna have to get him his own brush though, I've only got one good one these days, and he was goodnaturedly complaining about being stuck with the crappy brush.

Slept in the loft last night to listen to the rain falling on the tin roof. Sigh, I love that sound so much! Fell asleep to the soft rain, woke up to a friggin' monsoon! It was wonderful, and it continued all morning. I had fun watching it while I spent the morning putting the nook back together. Ayla (my little housemate) helped by playing with the nails and screws, Jonah cooked us all breakfast, and Ann took advantage of us amusing her daughter and filed all her papers!

Now Ayla is napping, I've got the house to myself (okay, and four dogs, cause Ruby is hanging out for the day). There is a fire in the fireplace, rain falling outside, and I am about to put together one of the two birthday cakes I baked today. Then tonight its off to dinner at my parents, and birthday movie night (not mine, though!). This has shaped up to be a pretty nice rainy weekend.

Hope you all had a good one too!

Maggie

Seashell Creations

2010-10-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

I have a cold, it started last Thursday. I discovered years ago that if I create art while sick, I make some truly gawd-awful stuff, so I decided that this would be an excellent excuse to break out the seashells and get to craftin'. After all, if I make awful shell creatures it doesn't matter cause no one else has to see them, and I'm not selling them, so I'm not ruining potential income! And I've been DYING to make some shell stuff for a couple months now...

And well, I was pretty happy with what I came up with! I know, many of you will be rolling your eyes, but I LOVE weird vintage shell art, the stranger the better, and I wanted to make some of my own. I'm picturing someday hosting a party, and the tables are all decorated with shell creatures, and then forcing all the guests to take one home with them when they leave... so much fun.

The above and below pictures are of the most elaborate creation to come from that day, and it actually started out as just the little guy holding the gun, only he was holding a pipe before Jonah got his hands on him. I was showing him what I had made that day (thinking he would only humor me, not actually get into it!), when he started getting all creative. Before I knew it, we had turned the glue gun back on, changed his pipe out for a gun, built him a nemesis to hold up for his brass rocking chairs, and glued "yer mama" to the front of it! Fan-freaking-tastic, I tell you. So much fun. He took it to work the next day to amuse and confuse his co-workers. They enjoyed it.

Some of the other things I made that day: Shell doggies, these came first, when I was just dipping my toe in the creative waters that is gluing seashells together.

And some shell peoples. One has a poodle, don't know where he found one so tiny.

And the shell monsters! I want to make some huge ones someday! I love all the eyeballs.

So thats it so far! I highly suggest on your next sick day you bust out some shells and hot glue and get to creatin'!

Unusual Life Blog

2010-09-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

I just discovered this blog while looking for animals made out of seashells on the internets. No joke, there is a house built like a giant seashell and it caught my attention, and it led me to here. Its my new favorite blog! Check it out! http://unusuallife.com/ so much fun...

A bit o this, a bit o that

2010-09-27T16:39:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody! Just a note to let you know I haven't disappeared, just had a busy life these days! I've been spending lots of time with my new boyfriend or as they call them on Anchorman, my "gentleman lover." Which cracks me up ever time I hear it, even if it is slightly inappropriate. I've also been in a frenzy to get my house ready for the winter. Just today I had the last cord of wood delivered, and Jonah has been coerced into coming over and helping stack it this evening with the promise of frozen pizza.

The rundown on what it takes to get my little place ready for winter:

Yard Cleanup: this has been started, the back is pretty ready, the front I have to wait until the last of the sunflowers are done blooming, and the tomatoes finally ripen. Hopefully the nice weather this week will make that happen!

Kindling: I borrowed a friend's chop saw and cut up any and all scrap lumber floating around my house. There was alot. Its all getting stacked under the trailer.

Canning and Brewing: I made up blackberry/raspberry jam out of berries from my house and Iris's place. Delicious. We made 15 gallons of homebrew in the last couple months, Jonah and I are going to make a batch in the next couple weeks with hops harvested from my plants! There they are below.

I painted my bedroom pink a couple weekends ago! Its a bright bubblegum/50's pink, and I love it. Pretty girly, but warm and comfortable, like the orange it had been before. I also found these great black velvet horse portrait paintings that now hang above my bed. Great stuff I tell you. Check that off the list, now I just need to paint the dinning nook a deeper, 50's sort of green...

Its pretty fun and crazypants around here with all this going on, and housemate and her daughter too! I love having them here, that kid is constant entertainment, and a constant challenge. I may have mentioned this before, but I seem to thrive on constant motion around me. And having them here means something is always going on!

Oh, seems my short note I was going to write turned into a full-fledged post! Happy Fall everybody! Hope you get your projects done before the cold sets in!

Maggie

End of Summer Brewing!

2010-09-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yep, that is my little housemate Ayla showing off her diapers and excellent rain boots! Beer brewing at my house is now more of a party with beer being brewed as one of the many activities one could participate in. We also have: fort building and birthday parties with Micah (shown below), drinking German chocolate cake shots with Naomi (not shown, but delicious, and very good for making you forget certain steps in the brewing process), watching inappropriate Smurf related videos courtesy of Rigel (thanks for that! Leah and I loved it!), and Idle Hands Ladies Auxiliary designing of the homebrew labels. I love it. It seems I thrive on the chaos of having a house full of people, all doing whatever they feel like doing!

Above is Micah's back, and the farm he built, Tim, Ayla, and Ann. Behind them are two of the carboys of IPA we brewed that evening. One is a straight IPA, one has a twist. We wanted to compare how they turned out.

And here is the other half of the group: Jonah at the computer, Rigel, and then Tim again. And below is all three beers bubbling away!

The beer on the right was brewed a week later, and is a dark brown ale. Look how happy it is bubbling away, it filled that pitcher with foam about once an hour for a day, it was crazy!

We bottled the beer last Wednesday, and there are pictures of that somewhere, but I'm not sure where! It was a fun night with three IHLA girls getting crafty making labels in the kitchen, kiddos playing in the living room (they literally pulled every toy Ayla owned and put it on the floor somewhere), and Tim and Yeder bottling beer in the backyard. I was hopping between each group making sure things were running smoothly! Fun times, I tell you!

I can't wait to try the beer, but its gonna be a few weeks for them to get all properly carbonated. Sigh, the waiting is the hardest part!

Green Bean Canning!

2010-09-07T10:15:00.001-07:00

A week or so ago I canned up some green beans. Mostly yellow wax beans, I think, and some really big green pole beans. My housemate got them from her babysitter, one of our crisper drawers was completely stuffed with them, so I decided to take action one night!

Turns out I only needed two of the five jars I washed out, but thats fine. I tried a recipe I found online, hope it turned out okay, cause I haven't cracked either of the jars open yet! But don't they look pretty?

Grandkid's room mural

2010-08-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

I painted a buggie mural this week for one of my mothers (I have several, including my actual mom, this one being my friend Carrie's mom Sue). She has five grandchildren with another on the way. Each grandkid has a different buggie nickname, and she thought it would be sweet if their bugs were painted in the room that is now theirs when the spend the night. I thought it was a great idea, and fun to paint. I came up with the giant vine for them to all hang out on.

Its a cute little room that used to be the guest bedroom, but now is furnished with bunkbeds for the kiddies. Lets see, there is a dragonfly, a damselfly (below), a butterfly, a bumblebee, ladybug, grasshopper, and a garden spider.

I had a blast painting this. I kept it loose and brushy and child-like, which makes for fast and fun painting. Sue loved it, and I can't wait to hear what the grandkids think!

Dog days of summer

2010-08-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

I think this picture says it all: its hot outside in Portland! Opal has dug herself a dirt pit, my to my dismay. I am not a fan of my garden beds being dug up by dogs, but well, Opal has other ideas, and is more stubborn than I am.

This week I hired a couple of nice gentlemen and their log splitter to take care of my gigantic pile of wood. I had about two and a half cords of wood piled up around the house, but it was all to big for me to deal with! Its a big task, and they are almost done with it. I am feeling relieved to have it cut up into manageable pieces long before it gets cold. Late August is usually when I realize that I am NOT prepared for winter. I'm feeling ahead of the game right now!

The turkey and the eating chicken are getting bigger. I had a bit of a surprise, Nellie the red broiler turned out to be Nolan the rooster. And, sadly, he started practicing crowing this morning. I feel his days are numbered in the single digits... The neighbors are pretty tolerant of my farm, but I think a crowing rooster might just push them over the edge.

And a current picture of Starla the Trailer. Shes really no closer to being painted, but I am now rethinking the color scheme, so it may be awhile. Perhaps next spring. I'm currently enjoying her retro colors. But I did have to paint the hitch. I like the red. Someday there will be a whole bunch of flower pots around the front of her! Ann and I are fully moved into the studio, and we just fit. I love it, and I think she does too.

Life is settling in here at my house. Routines are being made, quirks are being discovered, and we are all getting used to each other. Having Ann and Ayla in my house has been really awesome so far. Ayla is constant entertainment to watch and interact with (two year olds make you feel both old and young at the same time I've found). Watching her play with my dogs is hilarious. Marcus has infinite patience with her, and Opal finds her confounding. Cassady the cat watches and keeps her distance, even though Ayla REALLY wants to be her friend. Turns out my little house is big enough for three people, as long as one of them is small.

Some studio pictures

2010-07-27T19:57:00.000-07:00

I think I may have mentioned being busy moving the studio over to the trailer. And promising pictures. Well, here are some pictures, not many and not very good ones, but here they are! I started moving things in two weeks ago and realized pretty quickly that my plan to just move things in and build shelves later wasn't going to entirely work. So I moved some stuff, then spent half the next day building in some shelves above the window behind my desk. Below is a picture of that shelf! They turned out nearly level, as well and about eight feet long! Amazing! I get better at this building thing all the time, I swear.

These are some jars of my favorite things: Shells, paper bits, barak obama, plastic charms....

The glue shelf makes me so happy. Nothing quite like being able to see all your glues at once! And check out that view of my garden out the window, freaking awesome. My chair is right there so I can keep an eye on my tomatoes and my chickens.

Part of the pile of stuff I had to move out of my in house studio to the trailer. The other pile is just as big.

Most everthing had a place right away, but there was still five whole boxes of decorations that I had to figure out. Alot of it made it onto the walls, but I had to leave space for Ann to fit in too! We'll see how that works out, I am crossing my fingers!

That beautiful floor is from IKEA, and has the benifit of hiding all dirt that falls on it. It also hides anything else that might fall on it. Oh well, who cares? If I need it, I can sweep it up!

Now I just have to find the time to work in it. I did spend last friday afternoon working on a rush order and watching Harry Potter 3. It was very enjoyable, I think I may just love working out there....

My July as it stands

2010-07-27T19:33:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow is moving day for my new housemates Ann, her daughter, and their dog Leafis. For me, its the culmination of a couple months of frantic studio remodeling, yard clean-up (and child proofing, cross your fingers, that kid is smart!), and house clean out. A good house clean out and spiffing up is helpful at the end of any relationship anyway, so it was good to have a really great reason to be through: I need to make space for my new housemates!

Its been fun, and tough. I likes me a good project though, and working on your own house is the best project a girl can ask for! It has kept me from tending to my blog and my business though, so sorry about that folks. Sometimes you just have to tend to yourself first!

The garden is growing (after a late start, stupid wet cold spring!), the birds are laying eggs, and that turkey is getting larger by the minute. I think I can watch Turkelton grow. He isn't getting any smarter though. He has started sleeping on top of the henhouse with the girls, its sort of adorable. My friend Charlie caught him sleeping on the roof of the henhouse, with his head draped over a perch the other night. I'll post the pic below, its funny.

I spent last week at the beach with my parents, brother, and the dogs. It was also my 31st birthday week! It was four days of reading books, embroidering, shopping (i love shopping in Manzanita and Wheeler), and running the pups on the beach. They were in heaven, I think beaches were made specifically for dogs. There are gross things to sniff, water to jump in, sand to dig, and balls to chase. They made friends with a Husky, and Opal tried to get every person we passed to throw the ball for her. Unfortunately, she got nervous every time and never let them take the ball! She's a silly dog, and to smart for her own good.

The night before I left for the beach my good friends from High School Wes and Ce'Anne threw me a "dirty thirty" birthday party. It was a re-creation of the 18th birthday party we all threw for ourselves in high school, except this time we could all hold our alcohol and picked WAY better porn. Back in high school only two of the 20 or so of us were old enough to go to the porn store, and well, its rather hard to decide what to rent when you are new to the whole porn rental thing! All we can remember of the movies we watched back then was a housefrau with dishwashing gloves on. And the suggestive foods and drinks we made. It was a fun night.

This one was fun too! We decided to keep it small and only invite high school buddies and their partners. It was hilarious. The cake Ce'Anne made was the greatest thing ever. Those two are just as creative now as they were 13 years ago, and well, about as mature. Okay, who am I to talk, I had a porn themed birthday party! The movies of the night were parodies of real movies: Batman, The Big Lebowski, and True Blood. I would recommend the Lebowski one, those guys really loved that movie, and it shows.

Check out that cake below: freaking amazing!

And below is a no-so-great picture of me, it looks like I am going to sneeze! Wes brought that awesome fake mustache, and we passed it around. It was hard to smile with it on, it kept coming unstuck when you moved your lips!

Anywho, sorry if my party offended anyone, it was all in good fun! Happy summer folks, and check back, in a couple days there will be pictures of my studio up too!

Maggie

Starla is Finished!

2010-07-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the looooooooong delay in posting pictures of trailer progress! Its been a crazy month of Saturday Market, working for peoples, and pimping my trailer out. Exhausting, but totally worth it. Look at her, shes beautiful! If only I didn't have to put anything in her....

When I catch my breath I will do a long post devoted to her various stages, of which there were many, and hopefully there are pictures to match. I learned ALOT while working on her: electrical stuff (laying pipe and pulling wires, installing circuit breakers, installing plugs), woodworking (construction, dry rot removal, and paneling), and laying floors. Okay, so I sort of knew this stuff already, but by the time I finished working on Starla I felt so much more comfortable with all of these things. Trailer restoration is an empowering experience!

Thank you so much to my friends who helped me: Senna (sorry I badgered you so much), Val, Bobbie, Wes, Ce'Anne, Bud, Tim (we rock installing sub-floors), Charlie (for the advice and the electrician and his advice), and last but not least Lindsay! I couldn't have done this without you! And thanks to my parents for the loan and the support!

I know, she's not quite done yet. The exterior still needs a good cleaning and painting, but that will come in August or September. I've already got a professional painter friend lined up to help me figure that out. I love knowing so many construction folks! They rock.

Well, I'm off to start moving my studio out of the house to the trailer! Wish me luck finding places for everything!

Maggie

Bike Nutz Blog

2010-06-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody!

Check out the Bike Nutz Blog! They are nuts for your bike, sparkly, nutty, gonads for your ride! They are brought to you by the Idle Hands Ladies Auxiliary, otherwise known as Me, Naomi, Ann, Leah, and Erin from the Portland Saturday Market. We've been brainstorming and working on our nutz (oh, we like to say nutz, and ballz, we are obsessed with those too) for months now, and they are finally ready to be out in the world.

I had about ten pairs of nutz in my booth over the weekend, and I sold two pairs! Yay! To see our very first paying customer head over to the bike nutz blog. He was awesome, and picked himself out a lavender pair. So great.

Yes, I know they are crass, but they are so funny that it doesn't matter. Check them out, and if you want a pair, let me know! We are taking special orders while we are getting our etsy store figured out. And if you want to pick out a pair in person, go to Splurge on NE Fremont Street, or head on down to the Portland Saturday Market.

Maggie

June Freebie!

2010-06-07T07:52:00.001-07:00

A camper trailer design in honor of my new studio/camper! I am going to make these into curtains, i think they'd be pretty cute lining the bottom of curtains in my studio. They'd also be cute on some camping pillows! To download click here. Have fun!

Maggie

Some Tigerpup Embroidery...

2010-06-01T19:17:00.001-07:00

Kimberly was a student for my dish towel embroidery class at Collage last month. She is working her way through the "seven day forcast" set. Awesome! I'm so excited! Her blog is called Bambinosteps, and I am enjoying the heck out of it.

An apron embroidered by my friend Laurie, who has been embroidering up a storm! Its not finished yet, but will be covered by "under the sea" and "octopus's garden."

And I don't have any pictures yet, but my mom has been embroidering the heck out of my patterns and making adorable little "mini quilt" samples for my stores. Gonna get some pics soon.

And lastly, I have started a Flickr group for Tigerpup Embroidery. So please join up and share your embroidery projects! They don't have to be done with my patterns, just post 'em up!

Maggie

Meet Starla!

2010-05-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

No, Starla isn't another pet, Starla is a 1970, 17 foot, Nomad Camper Trailer! She is the new love of my life, and the second largest item I have ever purchased. Or rather, my dad purchased her, someday she will be all mine though. And there is Marcus, looking handsome in front of her.

I bought Starla to be my new studio, since my current studio (also known in realty circles as a second bedroom) will soon be the home of my friend Ann and her daughter Ayla. Big changes around here in my house! Brandon and I broke up, and now for the first time in 11 years I am a single lady! Its gonna be interesting.

But its also going to be REALLY fun. Ann and Ayla are great, their dog Leafis is awesome, and the chaos created by all of us in this little house will be enormous. And fun. I am looking forward to it. And I am having a blast with my new projects. You all know how I like to keep busy.

So back to Starla. I found her the day I started looking for a trailer to gut and make a studio. And she was perfect. The girl I got her from had already ripped her down to the studs, which I was going to have to do anyway. She was going to make a studio, gypsy caravan, or food cart out of her, and was so excited when I told her what I wanted her for. Match made in Heaven.

I pulled out all the wiring, and yesterday my friend Tim and I tackled putting in the subfloor over the former septic tank. The wood was all rotten, so we replaced it and tacked down some plywood over the whole thing. Trailers are fun to work on, cause well, no building codes! And it turns out me and Tim have similar building styles, as in, we fake it till it works, and then cover it all up before anyone sees how janky it really is underneath. You aren't going to fall through though, i guarantee it!
And here's the new floor! Lovely, I know. This will all be covered with new boards, and stained a lovely red (my kitchen floor color, I still have lots left), then sealed. The walls and ceiling will be wood paneling, and I have a large vinyl window to cut in to overlook my garden and chickens. And lots of built in shelves. Tons of them. Keep posted, there will be pictures!

Maggie

Turkelton and Nell, week 2

2010-05-27T09:28:00.001-07:00

It's freaking amazing how fast baby birds grow. One week, and Turkelton is twice the size he was a week ago, Nell too! Since Marcus and Opal were gone today staying with my parents, I decided to let the chicks explore my living room. Which is pretty funny to watch. Its even funnier to watch the cat watch the birds. She has no idea what to do with them.
Here's an example of what my cat does with birds. Here are the chicks exploring:
And here we see the full picture: Chicks exploring, and cat pretending to not be at all interested in them, by way of sharpening her claws on the carpet. Real sly, Cassady.
Stay tuned for more baby bird adventures! Tomorrow they will be moving from their recycling bin into a dog crate! More room to run, more poop for me to clean up!

New Poultry!

2010-05-19T20:52:00.001-07:00

Why, yes, that is a baby turkey! And another chicken! Spring is here, and well, for me that seems to mean more baby birds. And I have wanted to try my hand at raising meat birds since I read "Farm City." Iris and I were hanging out gardening on Monday when I mentioned that the feed store had a whole mess of baby turkeys, and she was like, well, you raise it my Forrest will kill it for us." And that pretty much sold me on it. I can raise 'em, I sure as heck can't kill 'em.

So off to the feed store we went. I decided to get a red broiler chicken to be its little friend while it was small. And so we could practice our poultry fixing before we did the turkey in. Chickens are ready to be eaten in less than three months, its crazy. The feed store guy said that they grow so fast that they literally can't walk after they get a certain age! Crazy.

So this is my experiment in raising birds for eating. I think I can do it, I certainly hope so, or I'm going to have a very large pet bird. Turkelton (named after Turk on scrubs) will probably weigh 25 pounds when he/she finished growing! Yikes! My chickens are around 6 or 7.
So this is Turkelton. Turk is a Bronze Turkey, which is a heritage breed I believe. I need to check out some books on turkeys from the library.
And this is Nell, shes pretty darn cute at this age. I can't wait to see how big she gets!
And here is my makeshift poultry brooder. It works great. Its easy to clean, stays warm and draft-free, and is recycling!

In other exciting spring news, I have a new renovation project in the works. My dad just bought a gutted, 17 foot Nomad camper trailer for me to use as my studio. We bring it to my house tomorrow, and from there -with a little help from my carpenter friends- I will rewire it, insulate it, and tack up some nice wood paneling. And ta-da, a brand new studio! Keep an eye out for pictures...

Maggie

Alberta Art Hop is this Saturday!

2010-05-14T09:14:00.000-07:00

Howdy folks! I know, my posts have been short and not to sweet for a bit, sorry about that. Lots goin' on in Maggieland right now thats just not fit for posting. But some things are, and one of those is Alberta Art Hop, which you should check out if you are in town. Its just this Saturday, and there will be food and art, crafts, jewelry, probably a parade, and mural painting! Yes, you too could paint part of a mural that will be hanging up on a building somewhere on Alberta Street in NE Portland. That guy above here is demonstrating how you too can paint a mural!

I will be there with my friend Emily of Hedgehog Hikers showing our wares to the world of Alberta Street. The fair runs from 11 to 6, and I believe the weather will be perfect, and the people will be friendly and fun to look at (if you have never been to Alberta street, you will LOVE the people watching).

And don't forget, I will be at the Saturday Market starting Memorial Day weekend! Cross your fingers for good weather then too!

Oh! and I almost forgot! I don't think I've mentioned that Fabric Depot picked up my Tigerpup Embroidery patterns and cards! Woot! I'm very excited, I'm crossing my fingers for good things there!

And I taught an Embroidery Class at Collage last night. Me and five fun ladies were decorating some dish towels with kitties, robots, seahorses, and a smiling sun. Good fun. I'm looking forward to teaching more embroidery classes!

Bye!
Maggie

First Thursday!

2010-05-06T14:47:00.001-07:00

Is tonight! So my friend Emily (hedgehog hiker pants for kids) and I are sharing a booth for the next four months of first thursdays. It will be cute, i promise. Come down and check us and all the other vendors out tonight from five til ten pm!

I'll try and remember to post pictures tomorrow, off to find the camera...

maggie

Goin' back to the Market!

2010-05-04T07:59:00.000-07:00

That's right, I'm heading back down to the Portland Saturday Market starting Memorial Day weekend I believe. I'm looking forward to it. While it is a bit of a pain in the behind some days, I really do love it it turns out. I miss my friends, and the energy down there. So I called up the market last week, and asked if I could pretty please come back! And they said yes!

So now I am working away on building up my stock and getting ready! Hope to see you all down there!

Maggie

Earth Day festiva!

2010-04-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, so i know its a week late, but PCC SE campus is hosting an earth day festival today. I'm off to try my luck selling there, seemed like a good place to get my feet wet since I haven't done a show this year!

Wish me luck!
Maggie

Wallace

2010-04-18T18:33:00.001-07:00

This little sweetiepie decided to come home with me and the dogs Saturday morning. We made it exactly a block and a half from our house before this uncollared, unneutered fellow found us. He actually ran almost an entire block to see Opal, he thought she was one sexy little lady. Did I mention he wasn't fixed? Cause he really wasn't.

For still having his balls he was a complete pushover! Marcus is a bit of a jerk when it comes to meeting dogs while he is on leash (he finds the leash frustrating, and takes it out on the dog. He's not being dangerous, just stupid, and it usually scares the other dog owner!) but Wallace decided he didn't care. So home I went with three dogs instead of two. The neighbors found that funny.

Got him home and really got a look at him. He looked about a year old, skinny as hell, with an eye infection and oops, COVERED in fleas. The biggest fleas I had ever seen. Poor baby. I threw him in the bathtub and scrubbed him down for about ten minutes. This dog is a trooper, he didn't even know me, but he let me scrub him down. Now, at this point I was beginning to question my posting him on craigslist and multnomah animal control's lost and found site. He was in pretty bad shape, and I didn't know if I wanted him to go back to where he came from. He was such a lover, and sort of timid, but had a completely solid temperament. I wanted something better for him.

I had already called my friend Iris, my sort of "dog rescuer partner in crime" and told her about him. She was already busy thinking up possible homes for Wally (as I had started calling him by now, guy needed a proper name!) and the first one on her list was her partner's mom, who had been thinking about a family dog. When I called that afternoon to say that Brandon and I were going to take him to animal control (which we really didn't want to do) she said that Forrest's mom was interested, and if not her, their friend Willow. Seems that a lab mix is WAY easier to find a home for than a pit mix (like our foundling Opal, who ended up staying with us). People seem to come out of the woodwork for a dog like Wallace! Of course, there are pitbull people too, like me, who will pick up any sort of pitbull she wanders across.

So Wally spent the night, and was an angel. The next morning we hung out all morning in the yard until Iris and her friend Cindy showed up to get him. Iris thought she'd have him for a day or so to check him out before Forrest's mom got him, but it turns out she took him home that afternoon! I love happy endings.

Here's a couple more pics of Wally and Opal. He got really attached to that beer bottle squeaky toy.

And again, no, I don't make a habit of giving away random dogs! I have come across many dogs while out walking Marcus and Opal, and usually they have tags, and look well treated. I manage to get them home. Wally showed up looking neglected, and that just isn't okay with me. If you can't take care of your dog, find someone who can. Or look for assistance. I found several animal rescues that will help out struggling pet owners with taking care of their pets. Wally went from a bad situation to live with a doctor and her family. I think that's a big step up. I feel really good about that.

Maggie

Crochet bowls!

2010-04-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

I found this on Design*Sponge while wandering about there. I've been kicking around learning how to crochet bowls, and I think I can follow this pattern!

Check it out here!

Embroidery Cards are in!

2010-04-10T10:24:00.001-07:00

Just updated the webpage, go check out my brand spankin' new cards to embroider! Other things you can do to them: color them in, stamp on them, use them as templates for traditional embroidery, hmmm, I'm sure I'm missing something. Above is a finished card, below, the card before!

They are simple and fun to do. The part that is in grey is the suggested embroidery. You can do whatever you want though, cause its your card. And I left space for you to stamp or write a little something like "happy birthday" or "smile bitchez!" Ya know, anything you want.

Six of them are brand new designs, the other four are swiped favorites from my patterns. Stay tuned, I'm going to be making some more!

And best of all, you can order them as the card, with an envelope and instructions and everything, or you can buy the PDF file and print them yourself! As many as you want, on whatever color you want. You just have to supply your own envelopes.

April Tigerpup Embroidery Freebie!

2010-04-08T10:53:00.001-07:00

I'll be posting a big post about this later next week, but look whats joining my embroidery patterns: greeting cards you can embroider! Fun, fast, and cute as the dickens, you will have a blast embroidering these, and your friend will be amazed, and possible keep the card forever.

This freebie is a nice little kitty. The PDF file has two complete cards on it, so just print it out (make sure your printer is on landscape, not portrait setting) on cardstock and stitch it! I'll be posting a tutorial soon on how to embroider paper, but if you can't wait for it, you can find them out there on the internet.

Have fun! Maggie

Kitchen Remodel part 2

2010-04-06T15:34:00.001-07:00

On Thursday we finally got our butcherblock countertop from Ikea. I say finally, cause we spent six frustrating weeks trying to get one! Its a long story, just let me say, don't trust the numbers on the Ikea webpage when you go there to see if something is in stock. Call before you go if you really want something! Argh, but we got it, and it was perfect. If you look at the above picture, you will see just how slanted our old countertops were. They floor slants, and it looks as though they decided to make the counters slant MORE by cutting the frame to follow the slant of the floor. Seriously. We have no idea what purpose this served, except to make you insane.

Here you can see how much we had to prop up the countertop to make it level. It is seriously four inches higher on this end than it was before to make it level with the other end. Crazy. I won't bother you will all my many inbetween pictures, and I apologize in advance for the blurriness of the following pictures, they looked clear on the camera screen!

We went with this fantastic mustardy orange color, its called "impulse." Its kinda wacky, but we love it, and now want to paint all the cabinets! But we will stop here for now. As you can see, our new sink is bigger than our old one, and stuck out a bit from the cabinets. I decided to play that up by spray painting it red (I love spray paint!). I'm thinking some cute, country flower design in white painted on the red sink one of these days.
And that's that! We've got a few more detaily things to finish off on it, like putting the pull out cutting boards back together, and making the drain stop leaking (plumbing is one of life's little mysteries, I think, but I will figure it out!). But all in all, we freaking LOVE our new counters! Best part, they feel like they are the right height for us now! Who knew?

New favorite cookie recipe!

2010-04-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so not the most favorite cookie, that would still be a pecan puff (ohhh, christmas cookies!) but a new favorite peanut butter and chocolate chip cookie! Sometimes, when I am spending hours doing paperwork, I start dreaming of fresh cookies. And thanks to the internet, I can find new ones to make!

Get the recipe here.

Tigerpup is on the lookout

2010-04-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

I am looking for more stores to approach with my Tigerpup Embroidery Patterns! If you know of a super awesome craft, fabric, or quilt shop I would LOVE it if you let them know about me! Or, let me know about them! Email me with their name and address, or email, and I will check them out! Or leave their name in my comments section.

my email: maggie@papaverjewelry.com

I've been wandering the Internet to look for stores, but word of mouth is SO much better!

Thanks a million, Maggie

Stitchy Blog!

2010-03-31T09:44:00.000-07:00

I was wandering the intertubes this morning and found this embroidery blog: Feeling Stitchy. Methinks I am in love. The further I wander into this craft the more I see! Check it out and be prepared to be amazed at the stuff you see there!

Maggie

New at the Historic Anchor Inn!

2010-03-29T12:04:00.001-07:00

Just finishing up an order of bottlecap pins, pendants, and magnets for the Historic Anchor Inn in Lincoln City! I visited there last year with my friend Iris and her two pups Rosie and Riley during spring break, and was completely enamored with it. I posted a long, gushing blog about it here.

I loved the place so much, and thought my style of jewelry would fit with their eclectic style, that I made up some sample pins with their logo in them and sent them off. Well, just last month I was contacted by the new manager of their gift shop, and now I will be sending off their first order in a few days! Yippee!

I'm also going to be taking Brandon on a quick overnight beach trip there soon so he can check out the fantasticness of the place. It really has to be seen to be believed.

So if you are heading down to Lincoln City, check them out, they are on the 101, just north of the main drag!

Maggie

Seattle for the weekend!

2010-03-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

We drove up to Seattle on Friday for the weekend, and it was great. A much needed trip out of town. Part of the reason for my taking sabbatical from the Portland Saturday Market was to spend a bit more time traveling. Doing those weekend things my friends do: camping (hmmm, maybe we will), road trips, beach trips, heck, even project days with friends. So when we were invited to stay with our friends Bill and Marissa we knew we'd have to take them up on it!

We lucked out on the weather, freaking sunny and warm the whole time. The drive up was glorious. We stopped by Ikea in our seemingly never-ending quest to find the countertops we want. The internet said they had three, the guys behind the counter when we got there said to never trust the internet. WTF? When I called Ikea on our way home to see if they had them in (which is what the guys said to do), Ikea would hang up on me! I guess you just have to cross your fingers and hope the product you want is in, cause there seems to be no actual way to find out before you walk through those doors. Sheesh!

But Bill's place is great. They live in a house in Ballard VERY similar to our old one on Ankeny. Its a crumbling down 1920's house, that was abandoned until recently. The owner fixed it up (sort of) and it has all these crazy rooms in the basement, along with the scariest stairwell ever. The top apartment hasn't bee rented out yet, so its all theirs right now. So while their house is in this overgrown garden jungle that you can hardly see from the street, the neighborhood right behind it looks like the Hollywood district in Portland. Really pretty. Their place is also a straight shot on the bus line down to downtown Seattle, which we took advantage of.

Friday night was a drunken mess of eating out and watching TED Talks on the internet. Which was really fun, I highly encourage everyone to check out TED. Really smart interesting people talking about what they are obsessed with. Great stuff.

Saturday we went downtown for some serious walking about. We visited the Public Library, which is AMAZING. Who knew a library could look that cool? And functional. It was the opposite of a musty, brick building full of books (which I LOVE btw). Its built entirely out of windows. Every floor is bright and airy, and full of books and places to sit down and work on your laptop. Wow. I told Brandon that if he got a job there I would move to Seattle. Or at least I thought it.

Seattle is a beautiful place, I know everybody says it, but it really seems to be a larger version of Portland. I was really happy to come home on Sunday though. There is no place like home. I did find a Fabric store up there that I would love to get my patterns in. Its called Stitches and its on Capitol Hill. It felt like home when I walked in, and the girls behind the counter were super excited about the sample embroidery pattern I dropped off. Cross your fingers, Tigerpup could be in Seattle soon!

Okay, enough rambling, I am getting over the 24 hour flu this morning. It started at 3 yesterday and gave me hell until about midnight. Ugh, there is nothing that makes you aprriceate health more than living in your bathroom for a night. Which I did. Brandon made me up a bed in there, and me and Opal (the pup) slept in there until about 3 am when I got up and made it to the couch to listen to "Return of the Jedi." Star Wars is like chicken soup for me. Now I have had two cups of soup, a shower, and feel much more human. Gonna spend the day embroidering and watching TV on the internet!

Maggie

Encaustic Chicken!

2010-03-16T15:44:00.001-07:00

Check it out! Okay, so not perfect, but I learned ALOT while I was working on it. One thing, is that I need a more of pancake griddle heated pan to melt the wax on. This one has a heated ring under it, and you can definitely see where the heat comes from, some of my wax colors stay more melted than the others. But it works for now. Also learned alot about the carving. I think I can only get better from here!

Below is when I thought it was first finished. Kinda boring, but sticks directly to the embroidery pattern. After I finished it, I realized that it needed more stuff going on, and so I added all the stripes. Now its more like: Super Chicken! ALso, I really need to get some red wax. Really badly.

Stay tuned to see more of my experiments!
Maggie

T-shirt Embroidery!

2010-03-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'll be teaching a class in April at Collage on Woodstock about embroidering on clothes! This is my sample piece, I think I may dye it blue first, cause its kinda an old t-shirt and would look better that way!

Embroidering on stretchy cloth is a bit different than on cotton. Its a bit trickier. But fun! When I know when the class is, I will post it here!

Maggie

Encaustic Experiments, Take One

2010-03-12T08:14:00.000-08:00

I mentioned taking an Encaustic Wax painting class a couple weeks ago. Well, yesterday I found the last couple things I needed to get started messing around in this medium! After visiting five Goodwills in the last week or so, I finally hit gold with the big one down on Grand (love that place!). I found the above hotplate thingy there. It has a temperature control, and best of all, it comes completely apart for easy cleaning-which it needed! It was greasy!

I also went by I've Been Framed on Foster to see if they had any more Lyra wax crayons to round out my colors that I had picked up at Collage, and they had a whole Encaustic section! It was very exciting for me. Here's my Encaustic palette after it spent an hour or so heating up and mixing, and then cooled over night:

And here is my first experiment! I'm really interested in transferring my embroidery patterns into other mediums, and I thought wax would be a perfect first experiment. I layered about five layers of wax onto a board, and then when it was just slightly warm, I laid my pattern on top of it and traced gently with a pointy metal stylus. The only drawback so far is that it cuts up the pattern a bit, so you would want to use copies of the pattern, not the pattern itself if you ever wanted to use that pattern again!
I'll wash those bits of paper stuck to the wax off before I start carving into it. But the shape transferred pretty well, don't you think?

The next step is to clean off the paper bits, then carve out the pattern and fill it with a different color (or two or three!) of wax! Can't wait to see how it turns out!

Maggie

Funemployment Radio

2010-03-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

One of the podcasts that we have to listen to daily is Funemployment Radio. They are a couple of people who used to be on the Rick Emerson Show on 101 KUFO before they fired all the interesting DJs (Like our friend Bobby "Fatboy" Roberts, and Cort). We didn't listen to the Rick Emerson Show all that much, but when these two Sarah X. Dylan and Greg Nibler started their own podcast show, we got hooked.

They are just fun and goofy, talk about all the things Portlanders like: drinking, sunny weather, rock n roll, drag queens, dogs, weird Internet stuff, and general goofing off. Its just fun stuff, never insulting, mostly good natured. Listening to them feels like hanging out with your friends, even if you are doing it while stripping wallpaper (which I did BTW, while listening to Funemployment Radio last week, and it helped make the time go faster).

But back to the earrings at the top of the post! I got this idea last week that was sort of silly, which made me think they'd like it. I thought it would be awesome to stick their pictures (stolen from their logo) on some scrabble tiles. I think Sarah would like them, she'd mentioned making jewelry with their logo on it before, so I decided to go for it. Hope them like them, cause I just mailed them off.

Give them a listen, you'll like it!
Maggie

Bolt and Gossamer

2010-03-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Tigerpup is in two new stores as of last week! Gossamer on SE Burnside and 24th-ish, and Bolt Neighborhood Fabric Boutique on NE ALberta and20th-ish. Yay! New stores are exciting for me. And those are two particularly pretty and fun stores to be in! All the pictures in this post are of Bolt, cause I just got my new tiny nikon coolpix in the mail and I got to try it out there. Sadly, I had no tiny camera when I was in Gossamer.

I want to make the sockodile so bad! he is adorable. Little baby Orson just had his first birthday, perhaps Auntie Maggie could make a Sockodile for him... good excuse!

The fabrics here are all beautiful. I was drooling, but contained myself, and didn't buy a single thing! Got to sell more patterns before the shopping spree...

And Gossamer, oh, the flat felt and wool roving are to die for! I had to keep my fingers to myself while I was there to avoid spending money! But I know for a fact that some of my mother's quilt group friends didn't do that, she got two emails from her friends saying that they bought my patterns at Gossamer! Yay, thank you ladies!

Handmade Social Network

2010-03-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

I stumbled upon this new social network a few days ago: Handmade Scocial Network. I think its gonna be great! Its brand spankin' new, and it feels really odd to be on the cutting edge of new, cause I am usually the last person to discover things on the internet. Guess I'm sticking to my new year's resolution: do more networking, and spend more time figuring out the internet and how it will help my crafty business!

So the Handmade Social chose me as their first artisan spotlight! Check it out here. Pretty nifty, I think!

And while I'm talking about the cutting edge of crafty networking on the internet, check out the craft map! I'm on it too! Its a map of the US and crafty folks sign up and get their webpages (or blogs) linked to it. Its pretty nifty, found a couple fun blogs already. Check it out!

Maggie

Spring is here in the Northwest

2010-03-07T07:18:00.000-08:00

Ready or not, Spring is here. Now, I've been ready for about a month, circling my favorite sounding squash, picking just the right type of sweet corn to grow (last year my trial corn was indian corn so that I wouldn't be disappointed if it didn't grow, instead I was disappointed that I couldn't eat it, I had so much!), and planning out the few new bushes I'd add to the yard. Also, drawing up the list of home and garden projects I'd like to complete this year. I've come to realize why it took my Dad 28 years to complete his list of projects on their old house! The list keeps growing!

I feel that this year's warm weather project list is a bit more manageable that previous years. The big one is replacing the kitchen countertops, which I know will mean that I also sand and repaint the cabinets the counters sit on. Thats fine, and really, great, cause they are in bad shape. We would have already done this, but silly Ikea is currently out of the countertops!

There is also the addition I want to put on the henhouse. This will perhaps make it so I can have more chickens (please Brandon? I want a polish and a silkie!) but the real reason is that I am tired of the chickens roosting on top of the henhouse, causing me to have to clean dried chicken poo off it once a week. Ick. If i build a second story, they will have to sleep inside of it!

More water barrels everywhere! Got one started this week, I WILL finish it today! I swear. If I don't make it down to visit the Saturday Market, that may take up all my free time today.

Keep that lawn I started growing. This one will be hard, I may actually have to learn something about lawn maintenance! Between two dogs and some Doug Firs, its hard in the hot summer months.

And, of course, all the little projects you think up for yourself as the season progresses: canning, brewing beer, and moving plants around. And fun larger projects at my parent's new house: Building fences, gardening, painting. Its a good thing I love having stuff to do!

Hope you have fun with all your home projects this summer too!
Maggie

Encaustic Class!

2010-03-04T14:33:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I took a beginning Encaustics class, and let me tell you, I am hooked on Encaustics! Yikes, just what I need, a new craft to explore. Oh, but what a FUN medium to work in. The Class was at Collage on NE Alberta Street, where Jodie teaches an Encaustic workshop about once a month. These are four hour classes, and totally worth it, the time just flies by, and she is a wealth of knowledge.

This class was focusing on photocopy transfers, but what I really wanted to learn is a technique called Intarge (probably spelled wrong, by the way). Its where you carve back into the wax and then fill it with a different color. So you are drawing with a carving tool, and then filling in the lines with a different colored wax. This makes a big mess, which you then have to scrape off back down to the layer where the carving is. Which is tricky. I'm not so good at it yet, but you can see my first try at it below:

Yep, those are some doodle flowers. I was getting the hang of it by the end. Sigh, can't wait to try it again.

The photocopy transfer technique was really cool too. I'm thinking it might be fun to take a design that you drew, get it photocopied, and then transfer it to the wax surface. Could be fun! This one is just one of the photocopies she had laying around there, but I do love Unicorns (what girl doesn't?) and I like how it turned out. I went pretty simple with mine, you should have seen what the other women came up with!

Anyway, I'm building up my encaustic supplies now, All I need to get started now is a hotplate. Anyone got one they aren't using?

Maggie

March Embroidery Freebie!

2010-03-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

This month's embroidery freebie is a slightly altered version of the Quetzal pattern I designed for my friend Laurie. To download it just click on the image above! She commissioned it for an upcoming trip to Costa Rica. Four lucky women are traveling to Costa Rica, and every night they will sleep on pillowcases embroidered with the Resplendent Quetzal. Isn't it a beautiful bird?
To get the color change qualities of the Quetzal, Laurie came up with a novel idea: mixing different strands of embroidery floss together to make a new, two (or three) colored strand to embroidery with! Now, this may not seem like a new idea to some of you, but it blew my mind! I love it, I want to do it all the time now! For the birds head feathers, we mixed two strands of lime with one of turquoise, and for the wing feathers two bright blues. So much fun, the bird seems to shimmer on the pillowcase.

And giving Laurie a refresher course on embroidery was fun too. She'll be a pro by the time she finishes her third pillowcase!

Maggie

Home Brew and Life

2010-02-26T10:38:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend I finally fixed the busted pipes that run from our washing machine faucet out to the sink on the back patio, so we could make homebrewed beer again! Okay, so we could have used the bathtub, but that is so much more awkward than the sink built for this purpose! The plastic pipes that supply the water broke during that first hard freeze of the winter. Somehow it took me by suprise and we just didn't turn the water off to out there! Luckily, I noticed the crack in the pipes while they were still frozen, so we didn't have any leaking. And, plastic pipes are REALLY easy and cheap to fix!

So here is our first homebrew of the year, almost a year to the day from when we made our first ever homebrew (the lovely Chicken Pesto Pale Ale). This one is from "famous beers of the world" and is similar to New Castle Brown Ale. We'll see how similar in a few weeks! This picture is of it bubbling away under the table in the living room, where it will stay nice a warm to keep those little yeasts happy.
Here are the pups goofing off while I was taking pictures. Opal is a year old now! We decided that her birthday is February 19th. We are pretty sure she was born in February sometime. Look how ferocious she is. Marcus is so patient. Sigh, she turned out bigger and less of a pitbull than I hoped, but she is pretty in her own muttish way, and REALLY sweet, if a bit completely crazy. And she finished off her war against my new Dansko shoes this week, finally eating them past wearability. Grrr... But we love her anyway....
And for some reason we have gotten obsessed with puzzles lately. Bought five new ones (well Goodwill new) and are currently working on a "Can you see what I see?" one that is great. We think Opal has only gotten one of the pieces...

And Brandon's newest finished painting! There is a much better picture of it on his webpage, and a fun how he painted the sand (which he did, crazy man) blog post. So check it out! Its hanging in our living room right now, perhaps you might want it for your living room?

Maggie

Tigerpup Embroidery at Collage!

2010-02-21T08:06:00.000-08:00

To see Tigerpup Embroidery in person (as opposed to on the world wide web) you can find it at three (count 'em!) stores in Portland!

They are at Splurge on Fremont on Consignment. Splurge is a locally owned artists boutique. Its owned and run by three couples, all of which are friends of mine from the Portland Saturday Market. I've also got the largest selection of my jewelry there outside my own booth, wherever that may be set up this year. Two of the girls there are in my Idle Hands group (hi girls!).

Maria at Collage has the honor of being my first wholesale sale for Tigerpup! Thank you Maria! Tigerpup was dreamed up out of my working there for a couple seasons. The inspiration you get from working in an art and craft store is phenomenal. So its doubly exciting that the two Collage stores are my first wholesale clients!

So go, check out my full line of patterns and pick them up, at a Retail Location near you! Collage on NE Alberta or SE Woodstock, or Splurge on NE Fremont!

Maggie

Beautiful Day

2010-02-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

Its a beautiful day in Portland today. Its gonna be difficult to get any work done with that sun outside. But I'm going to try to get the studio organized before I give in and do some gardening. Oh, and cleaning out my car.
It was briefly stolen on Monday (gone for three hours before the police found it), and while they just tossed it for stuff and didn't break anything or do anything gross in it, I think I'd still feel better if it was clean. And it smells like dogs.
Happy pretty Portland day to you all!
Maggie

All Ten Patterns are Done!

2010-02-13T07:51:00.001-08:00

My first ten patterns for Tigerpup Embroidery are finished! Hooray! Designing them was fun and challenging. You might think that it would be easy, they are just line drawings after all, and fairly simple looking-where's the work? But you would be wrong. Though it may not look like it, alot of thought goes into each pattern.

Firstly, theres coming up with a theme. Sometimes that is easy, sometimes they are a bit to silly or weird, and then you have to decide weather it can be made into something other people would like, or if its something only you would like. Or, heck, if its something you would even like a day or two from now!

Then the images that make up the design. Also any words you might have. All those have to be thought out. And once you've got your outline of what you would like, you have to make sure those images you are designing will look good floating in space. Cause that is usually what they are doing: floating in space on a stretch of fabric. They usually aren't rooted to the ground, there usually is no embroidered ground for them to stand on. So their poses have to be considered. And then reconsidered. I've thrown out alot of perfectly good drawings because the poses weren't correct.

And you've got to consider how they could all be put together. I like taking a few of the images and creating a larger, more complex embroidery out of a few small ones. Thats when i realized that having mirror images of an image (like say a goat looking left, i'd have to copy that goat and switch him to look right as well) is a really smart thing. You can use them to frame something else.

So then lastly you have to place them all attractively on a page. I like to go with symmetry when it calls for it, otherwise just something fun. The symmetry (I think) helps people's brains get excited and working on design possibilities. And it's pleasing to the eye, and looks professional.

Huh, thats a ramble. I was just going to post that all ten patterns are done! But its true, it really is alot of work! And the packaging, and the webpage, and the catalog.... I'm really proud of what I've done, and now I can't wait to get them into some stores and see how they do!

My March freebie pattern will be up on the page soon, I think it may be a large tropical bird... keep your eyes peeled for it!
Maggie

My first quilt

2010-02-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

As you probably know from reading this blog, I've been embroidering. Alot. And I got tired of doing flour sack towels, so I started working on colored cottons. Super fun to work on, but not so useful. I realized that I needed to put all these cute little designs together in one sample location. And the best way to do that: quilt.

So I raided my mom's quilt fabric stash for Kafe Fassett fabric, batiks, and vintage reprint cottons. Fun stuff! I decided right away to make 12 by 12 inch squares of mismatched rectangles. This freed me up from any patterns to just go crazy putting different colors together! I really like how it turned out. Its a bit brighter than I planned (big surprise there, me going bright) but I couldn't afford to go to the store and buy calmer colors-which is what I would have done if i could-so I just went with what I like, the brights that were free!

Its a small square quilt, and I love it. Its kinda hard to use because I don't want the dogs to dirty it up! I may have to put it upstairs where they can't touch it.

Hope you like it!
Maggie

Josephine Kimberling is awesome!

2010-02-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

I was poking around on the Robert Kaufman fabric website and happened upon Josephine Kimberling's patterns. So I had to check her out! Look at these! Sigh, I want them all. Check out her webpage.

Her blog is fun too, and she is a somewhat local designer, she went to school and lives up in Washington. And she designs for Impress stamps. I think I want to be her!

Knit Picks Catalog

2010-02-01T09:17:00.000-08:00

So we hosted a photo shoot for Knit Picks, a local (well, Vancover) knitting catalog back in November (I think). They were so much fun to watch work, we had my friend Christina - who is the catalog editor - and two camera people and the one adorable little model hang out all day taking pictures of really cute knitted clothes in my house!

You would recognize the model if you have the Chinook Book, shes the runner on front pushing the baby stroller with the chicken inside. I think that's awesome. She loved Marcus and Opal, having some large mixed breed pups of her own. And she had fun (or at least was a really good sport) feeding my chickens in the coop for one of the shots. Its kinda funny to see photographers try to wrangle chickens.

To see some of the picks, go to their catalog page and scroll through. Our house is the first section, as soon as you get to the toys stop! Or keep going, and see everything else. Its pretty.

Maggie

Joslin Wedding Shrine

2010-01-30T10:45:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I like to make shrines for my friend's for their weddings. Actually, I would like to make them all shrines for their weddings (also for births, houses, great new jobs, etc) but I don't have the time! Sheesh guys, stop doing these great things! (no, don't listen to me).

So this shrine was a couple years in the making. Yep, their second anniversary is this month, so I guess it's just shy of two years. I was having a hard time with it, I kind of knew where I wanted it to go, I just couldn't get it there. Also, I did something to it that I thought was hideous, and it took me a while to decide how to fix it. I'm not going to tell you what it was, just trust me, it was gross.
I'm particularly pleased with the shell arch on top. They got married on the beach, and while I don't think that any of these shells are from Jamaica, I don't care. I LOVE LOVE tacky seashell art, and felt the need to express it here. They are generally less kitchy decorators, but they seemed pretty thrilled with it when I gave it to them last week. A little kitch never hurt nobody, says I.

Okay, off to watch "Honey" starring the lovely Jessica Alba, and glue some bottlecap pins.

Free Embroidery Patterns!

2010-01-24T10:24:00.000-08:00

As part of Tigerpup Embroidery, I thought it would be fun to have free monthly embroidery patterns that you can download and print yourselves! My plan is for them to be something you could use along with the more elaborate pattern sets, but who knows? I could get crazy sometime. For starters though, we've got banners and hearts.

The banners will be great for embroidering names, dates, words, or sayings into. And since they are PDF files, if you want to you can resize them easily to fit your needs! Click on the picture to download.

The hearts are for Valentines, obviously, but they can work anytime! I think I may have incorportated a few of them into my "I love chickens" set. I'm looking forward to doing the little birdies myself. And if you feel you need to practice your french knots, do the "be mine." You'll be a pro by the end! Click on the picture to download.Enjoy!

Maggie

Home from the beach!

2010-01-23T18:39:00.001-08:00

Oh man, what a frigging perfect trip. And the drive home, Divine. The weather was warm and sunny, and we had Leah with us (her Tim had to drive home last night to work today), so we took a poll and decided to drive up the 101 to Tillamook and enjoy the sights. And we sure did enjoy them! I pointed out the Historic Anchor Inn (where Iris and I had a blast last March), and Leah the place she likes to stay (I wanna call it Elenor, but thats wrong) which is about a half mile from the Historic Anchor. Stopped for some lunch at the Taco Time in Tillamook. Which was a good thing, cause riding in the back seat of the car for a couple hours made me kinda queasy. Brandon and I switched driving duty then, and he took over the back seat dog wrangling duties.

Leah is a delightful driving companion. She takes the role of passenger/entertainer very seriously. She knows she likes to talk alot, so I hope she doesn't mind that we dubbed her a "chatterbox" on our way home from dropping her off. We very much enjoyed her chatter, I likes me a good storyteller, and she does it well. Also, she listens well too, so its not a one way street! cause Lordy, I like to chatter too!

The dogs are curled up by the fire sleeping. I'm glad it wasn't too cold here while we were gone, cause it still took a while to heat the house up after we got home! Thats the one real problem with wood heat, it doesn't keep the house so warm when no one is around to fill it!

I'm feeling a bit renewed (and tired), and ready to tackle fixing the bugs in my new website, and finishing the last three embroidery designs I want to have done before trying to find some stores to carry my patterns! Then the hard part starts: contacting stores. My least favorite thing about being self employed. Anyone know a good sales rep?

Maggie

At the Beach, and its wonderful.

2010-01-22T17:10:00.000-08:00

If I had a camera handy, I'd post a pic of the beach. But mine is broken, and I'm to lazy to find Brandon's, and between Leah and Naomi there are about a gazillion photos to go around. So there will be some pictures, just later. I'm typing right now on Naomi's laptop, cause this place has an internet connection. And while I am generally against having computers at the beach, I'm here with a bunch of working girls, and they can't leave their work behind! I, on the other hand, don't mind not being able to be reached for a few days.

But here I am on the computer, cause I was doing something unrelated to this blog and they left me alone for a second. We are at the beach with most of my Idle Hands Ladies Auxiliary group. A bunch of super talented crafty ladies who I have gotten really close to in the last year. And their men and children and dogs. We are having a great time, and the best weather I think I have ever had at the beach, and that is including the summer. We are staying in Waldport, with the beach literally as our backyard. Its insane. You walk out the back door, and you are on sand. So we spend alot of time running the dogs and the kids on the beach, whacking golfballs, and trying to fly kites. The weather is in the 50's, its sunny and not to windy. I was outside in a freaking T-shirt today! The dogs are having a blast (there are four of them). And so are the kids (two of those).

We each get a room, there are four, and all the beds are at least queen sized. Ours is so big we sleep on 2/3rds of it. Seriously, I reached out my arm this morning and couldn't touch the end! Opal had that part, and even she couldn't reach the end, and she is usually hanging off ours. We have a full, so its a big difference.

We've been working on something kinda top secret for the Idle Handz, the plan is to market it and thereby fund all future beach trips. We'll see, and I'll be sure to announce it when its unveiled. Some of you already know what I am talking about. They are glorious. And sparkly.

Okay, I'm going to go learn how to make pasta from scratch now. Have a lovely evening folks!

Maggie

Papaver Studio webpage is up!

2010-01-19T19:20:00.000-08:00

Yes, indeed it is! Whew, that was ALOT of work. Alot of picture taking, and typing and doodling out possible page layouts and just in general making myself crazy trying to make sure everything is on there that I needed. Days of doing that. But I like it. I like how its turning out. Its pretty basic, because I am no page designer, but its functional. And well, I can pretend that I like the spare look. I mean, I do, but its not the way it would look if I, ya know, knew what I was doing.

So please go check it out! My brother set me up with a google voice account, so I can have my work calls routed through there. They even get transcribed into emails so that I don't have to listen to the calls if I don't want to! A-freaking-mazing. Technology is good right now for those of us who have less than stellar phone answering skills. I mean, I will answer if I know the number calling, but if I don't -- well, its most likely someone wanting to sell me something.

My new website is called Papaver Studio. It encompasses the Tigerpup Embroidery, and Papaver Jewelry. I called it Studio just in case I come up with something else I want to make! I figure if I have a "papaver studio" sign above my studio door, than the stuff that comes out of it is from there! The page is in its first draft, I've already found things that I need to change! But its about 95% there I think. I hope.

I really like how the Tigerpup Embroidery patterns are turning out. I think I may be most proud of them of all the things I have come up with in my life. Its like they are turning out fully realized. Unlike the jewelry which I feel like it is constantly getting better, always tweaked, these patterns are kinda perfect. That's not to say they won't improve and evolve, its just, dang, so nice. It does help that they were a much simpler product to create, but still, I am happy with them.

Sorry if this post doesn't make perfect sense, I am typing with "black hawk down" blasting in the background. Brandon is in the mood for some war movies after watching "julie and julia" which he did really enjoy, just well, no explosions. It would be easier to type to though!

Anyway, off to the beach for a few days with the Idle Hands Ladies Auxiliary. Should be tons of fun. We've got lots of crafts to do if the weather is bad (well, that doesn't really matter), dogs to run on the beach, and kids to play with. Oh, and the guys to get drunk with. We've got lots of home-infused vanilla vodka to drink!

cheers, maggie

Felted Acorns

2010-01-10T11:33:00.001-08:00

A couple weekends ago I taught my friend Christina how to needle felt by making needle felted acorn ornaments with her! The inspiration was posted on the Idle Handz blog in December, and since I saw them I was determined to make my own. So here they are! And here's the post of the inspiration! You should really check out our Idle Handz blog anyway, cause of all the cute pictures of the kids and pups. Seriously, we do make stuff, but the kids are hilarious and do lots of cute things. I guess that is what they are for, I know thats what the dogs are for!

Anyway, these were superfun to make and cute. I'm gonna make a ton more I think...

Happy New Year!

2010-01-03T21:33:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody! Happy New Year! Just joined the facebooks, that being my new year's resolution and all. Well, not just the joining facebook, but doing more online networking type stuff anyway. Its all part of my "get my jewelry and whatnot out there" plan for 2010. We'll see how it goes!

So click on the "facebook" icon on the side of the page if you want to see me, or become my friend? Cause that would be super neat. Happy New Year peoples!

Maggie

Merry Christmas Everybody!

2009-12-24T23:40:00.000-08:00

Just finished watching "Die Hard" with Brandon, the pups, and Peter, my brother. Favorite Christmas movie of them, my second favorite after "White Christmas." Which, I believe, is playing ALL DAY on Amc on Christmas. Yay!

Us and the pups will be heading on over to my parents house for the last Christmas at the childhood home. I'm strangely excited about it, but then, I'm always excited for Christmas. Did a little Christmas shopping for myself today, I went on Ebay and got myself a couple new (okay, new to me, gently used) Dansko shoes. Both my faithful pairs are dying on me at the same time. The soles are practically gone on one pair, and the other pair is following. They have lost that super-comfortableness that makes danskos so great. Hence, the new pairs. I'm getting two pairs for like, 80 bucks! Which is under my $100 limit that I gave myself. Its a splurge, but well, not really being as I gotta be able to walk around all day, and these are the best for it!

Sorry for the rambling, I'm pretty tired, but Brandon just ran out the door to look at the stars with his constellation book, and so I thought I'd post a Christmas post while hes out there. Its eleven forty five on Christmas Eve, and all is well. And while cold, not a cloud in the sky, and so no snow this year! First time I've ever been happy there is no snow on Christmas! Usually, there is no snow and I am sad. I think last year's two week storm is gonna stay with me for a few more years, and then I will go back to being sad that there is no snow on Christmas.

Okay, enough rambling post! Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.
Maggie

Festival of the Last Minute

2009-12-15T14:38:00.000-08:00

This week is the beginning of the end of the year for the Portland Saturday Market. The "festival of the last minute" starts Thursday and runs until Christmas Eve, when it ends at 3:30! I will be there for the weekend in my usual spot, and Tuesday the 22nd and Wednesday the 23rd in whatever spot I can get! The festival weekday hours are 11 to 6 pm. And my friends, 6 pm is DARK! But we've got lights, and Christmas lights, and its pretty, if kinda cold.

So come on down and support your local craftspeople!
Maggie

Christmas card Day!

2009-12-08T08:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was our Idle Hands Ladies Auxiliary day. The day in which five of us crafty bitchez from the Saturday Market get together and make something unrelated to our work for a day. I know I've mentioned it before. Last month was embroidery (in which I snuck in some work, since I'm working on embroidery). So this month was Christmas cards!

I love Christmas card day, we get all my stamping stuff out, drink mimosas and coffee, and eat cookies! And the kids are old enough now (excepting baby Orson, but he was having a great time too) that they can entertain themselves with just minimal watching (and running to look every time we here either to much or not enough noise). Opal had a great time running around with Ayla and Micah (the kids). Marcus got overstimulated and had to take a nap (of course).

So here's some pictures, they are up on the Idle Handz blog. Here's Leah's pics. And here are Naomi's. Go check them out, you can see parts of my house, and adorable kids, and crafty cards!

Maggie

Tigerpup Embroidery Patterns!!

2009-12-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

The first draft of Tigerpup Embroidery Patterns are finished! I've got six sets in all, and they will be making their debut at the Camp Cactus Holiday Sale (all weekend at the corner of 45th and NE Brazee, in the cute garage studio of Cactus Jane) This weekend! All the wrinkles have yet to be ironed out, I'm still figuring out the exact wording of the info sheet, and the cover design. Yadda Yadda, there is stuff to do, but they are ready to get into the hands of happy little embroiderers! Heck! This might be a good time to do a first ever Papaver Studio blog give away! Hmmm, next week I think I will make it up when I have time next week!

Here's a little sneak peek: The cover! In real life, it will be printed directly on the envelope, and get this: all my paper I will be using will be 100% recycled! Rad, huh? I love the brown paper bag envelopes, and hey, recycled! The white paper? why, thats recycled too! Sadly these mock ups are only like, 30% recycled. That's my Opal the original Tigerpup, as the spokespuppy/logo for the line. Cute no?

And the interior! Each set comes with at least two pages of designs! Yay! More stuff to choose from, or different sizes of the same thing.

And the carbon paper and instructions on how to transfer your images. key, pick a small ballpoint pen, and press evenly! Also, iron first, it helps.

And the whole set together for your viewing pleasure!

More designs to come, i have so many ideas I can't keep track of them!
Maggie

I love Craigslist!

2009-11-24T20:27:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before (above) I love the Craigslist! Its been particularly good to us lately. Last week we put the canopy from our old truck up, and a day later, sold it to a nice girl who had just bought (also on CL) a 79 toyota longbed pickup! Ours had been a 78, so I was really happy it went to a new old toyota. Brandon even installed it for her, we were super excited to get it the hell out of our driveway!

And then just yesterday, I found this beauty in the furniture section!
Isn't it great? Okay, so there are MUCH better leather couches out there in the world, but this one met my requirements of a) not looking like the cushions are melting (I hate those couches with the layers of flabby cushions) and b) being brown, and c) having arms and d) brandon can lay down on it, e) its comfy, and most of all f) the dogs can't make it smell all funky. Which our other couch had turned into the funky dog smell couch. To be fair, it was a fabric couch, and the dogs did alot of quality loungin' on it. But it smelled BAD. And I've been searching for a good leather replacement for a couple of years off and on on the CL. So happy are we! Its also our Christmas present from my parents, that we are getting paid back for (thanks mom and dad!)
From the other side. Good stuff. Our old couch we put out on the curb at 1 this afternoon, and by about 4 it was gone. Thanks again, Craigslist! And that one didn't even have any back cushions on it, and I advertised that it was kinda stinky. Hey, it has good bones, and you can clean it up. Hope they like it.

Since it was so pretty today I took on the job of yard cleanup. Cleaned out the coop, swept, and raked up all the pinecones and whatnot that falls in the yard. Thought I'd take a couple pictures of the ole' place while I was at it! The lovely orange fence (formerly to hold chickens) has been reused to keep the dogs out of the "lawn" I am growing. I am particularly excited that it started growing since I seeded it late October!
The girls out pecking around. Their feathers have grown back in mostly from the moult. Dear lord, i cleaned out some serious feathers from the coop today! Hope they are happy, ungrateful little birdies!

And Henrietta, looking all pretty and red. Shes a good lookin' bird!

Thats all, Happy Thanksgiving everybody! We will be celebrating our last one at my childhood home this year, My parents have officially sold theirs, and as of today, have had their offer accepted on another one all the way in the west hills! We'll never see them again, since it is well known that Eastsiders don't go that far West!

Holiday Sale!

2009-11-19T13:04:00.001-08:00

I'm participating in the annual holiday sale on the corner of brazee and 45th in ne portland. This is the last time I'll be able to say its "on my parent's block" since they are in the process on closing the sale of their house and buying a new one (cross your fingers, the one they want has a hot tub and indoor pool!).

The sale is fun, and friday night is the night to go, cause there is wine and cheese and all the good stuff goes fast! Also, its cheery and bright in there, and I'll be debuting my embroidery pattern line if all goes as planned! So I guess I'd better get back in the studio and work on it some more!

Maggie

Beach Trip and Friend's Thanksgiving

2009-11-17T08:30:00.001-08:00

Last week we went on a much needed vacation with my brother Peter. We took him (and the dogs) to La Playa, perhaps our favorite house at the beach. I blogged about it almost a year ago, when we went with our friends Senna, Val, Wilder and Christina right after Christmas. It is the ultimate in Seventies beach house chic. Just as much fun this time! We did all the usual things the Kearns family does at the beach: read, walk on the beach, read, Peter plays portable video games, I work on a craft (needle felting and embroidery), Brandon takes pictures of the beach. Oh, and some antique shopping. When I see the coffee table Peter got again, I will take pictures. I will do a blog on awesome coffee tables, because his is the second coolest coffee table, after my own. Which, if you are interested, has a twin in Rob Zombie's "house of 1000 corpses." No joke, haven't seen it, but I have in on good authority.

But back to the beach. It was perfect. Nice during the day (a few sprinkles, not much) and stormy at night, but somehow both nights before the storms it was clear, and you could go out and see the stars. And since there was no moon, man, there were STARS. And Peter's phone has a super rad (and handy) star chart that uses GPS to line up with the actual stars! What is the world coming to that your phone can tell you where the constellations are? Wacky. But fun!

Look! We are doing good, two pictures in a week with both of us in them! That is seriously a first in our 11 years together (oh, our anniversary is this week, yay us!)
And Me and Peter, for Mom and Dad. Someone thinks they will be getting this picture for Christmas...
My finished tea towel with my own embroidery patterns on it. Yep, I'm gonna pat myself on the back and say I'm pretty good at designing them. Gonna work on more today!
And the boys doing what the beach is for: Reading Stuff. Check out the brown carpet and rad wood paneled walls. They don't make 'em like this anymore!
And finally, some action shots of the dogs. They got the hang of playing fetch this week. I think it helps that they were playing alone, usually they play with Riley and Rosie, and Rosie is a world class fetcher. The rest of the dogs just have to run along, since they aren't gonna get the ball anyway. And if they do, they just drop it and she brings it back. Not this time, Opal had to learn to bring it back herself! Marcus only completed the circuit once. But hey, that ain't bad, cause he isn't a fetching dog. Look at the air Opal gets!
Doesn't Marcus look freaky running at you? We were lucky this week, hardly a person or dog on the beach the whole time we were there, so no one for him to scare. Not that he means to, cause he really doesn't. He's just happy to see you!
This is a double post, cause here is Friend's Thanksgiving! The day after we got back from the beach, we took off for the weekend to Iris and Forrest's house in the country for a 14 person thanksgiving. With Pot roast instead of Turkey. Mmmm, pot roast....

Here are the pups sitting for Roast. Left to right: Marcus, Rosie, Opal, and Riley. Poor Lukas was to short to be in this picture. That's Iris in the skull and rose apron. Me in the jeans and grey sweater.

Sorry for the yellow light, but the flash is icky in this room. Two big dining room tables stuck together to make one HUGE one. Perfect for all of us. That farm house they moved into is awesome for parties, a big living room/dining room combo, plus three extra bedrooms for guests. We claimed the first floor one for us, cause I like to be near a bathroom (I've got a teeny bladder, I know, to much information).After dinner came the games, That picture is of me, iris, and Wes playing cribbage. They tried to teach me, but well, math and the evenings makes me sleepy. I played one game, then broke out the embroidery and hung out. Next to me is Steven, he was playing Rummy or something with Dean and Roxanne. At the end of the table were the rest of the crew playing Poker. Wow, what a difference the years make, even a few years ago it would have been drinking games and dancing, now its card games and wine and crafts!

Okay, there was a little dancing. Brandon got it into his little wine-drunk head that he needed to dance, and he got Wes's boyfriend to dance with him. Awkwardly. It was hilarious, and somewhere there is video of the whole thing, with Wes's cackling laugh in the background. He was rolling on the floor with tears in his eyes, he was laughing so hard. Oh Brandon, you are so silly sometimes.
It was a great night, it ended with Wall-E and Bananagrams. The next morning was OPB and a breakfast bake. And coffee, lots and lots of coffee.

Embroidery Day!

2009-11-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

So I had the Idle Handz Ladies Auxiliary over on Tuesday to do some serious Embroidery! Okay, not so serious, we really never are anyway, but fun embroidery! The Idle Handz is a small group of us Saturday Market girls that get together once a month to do some crafting that has nothing to do with our regular crafty jobs. Except this month I kinda snuck in my own crafty job, in that I am designing some embroidery patterns to hopefully get a line of patterns going. We test drove some of my "Octopuses Garden" set.

You can see some pix and some of our other projects at our Idle Handz Blog!

I'm off to the beach for a few days, so have a good rest of your week!
Maggie

Sunday Fun

2009-11-09T09:13:00.001-08:00

We went to the Chinese Garden this past rainy Sunday for some tea. We haven't been there in about four years so its was fun to see how much stuff has grown. Even at the end of the season, you can tell that the place has really matured. I want to go next summer when everything is fresh!

I actually thought to have someone take a picture of us so here we are! I have to say, my cheeks look enormous, gotta do something about that, like eat less candy. Hmm, maybe I won't do something about that after all...

And some more pictures of there, its just so pretty.

After tea and snacks at the garden (I got the Jasmine Pearls, always a good choice I think) we went to Powells books to do some shoppin'. I found "Handmade Nation" for inspiration, and "Embroidery Stitches" cause, well, I need to learn some proper stitches if I'm gonna make embroidery patterns! Which are coming along REALLY well, I have to say. The last book "Un Lun Dun" is by Chine Mieville, and I loved two of his other books, so I think I will like this one too. He is just so imaginative, and this one has little drawings of the crazy things he comes up with! Can't wait to read it.
And then, cause I saw it at Powells but didn't want to pay $25.oo for it, I borrowed "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" from my friend Bobbi. Can't wait to read it either. Haven't read Pride in a couple years, and well, add some zombies, and I am a happy camper! Turns out this one is also illustrated! Fun drawing of zombies in a Jane Austen book.
The embroidery designs are coming along swimmingly. I've got three pattern sets almost done, I'm fussing with the last of the three that are drawn this morning! Possibly I'll post some pics soon!

Maggie

Boo Kitty Pattern

2009-11-04T21:50:00.001-08:00

So I think that if you click on this picture below a larger version will come up, and I am guessing you can print that. I am going to try right now to see if it works!
Hmmm, so it prints it a bit smaller and cuts off some of the right side. I will work on this further...

Okay, so for some reason i can't seem to make this work tonight! I'm getting to frustrated, so I think I will stop trying for now! Hey, I know, email me at maggie@papaverjewelry.com, and I can email you the jpeg of the page! That WILL work!

Maggie

Halloween Felt Cat Ornament!

2009-11-01T12:20:00.000-08:00

I know, a day late, but hey, 364 days EARLY for next Halloween! Its never to early to start on next years decorations... I designed this little guy a few weeks ago, and finished my prototype a couple weeks ago. Which means that I meant to put this on the blog like 10 days ago! In the next week or so I plan on scanning the images and writing directions and posting it for free download on the blog. If I don't remind me! He's really fun to make!

Here's the start, the drawing. I then traced the various parts on to tracing paper and loosely cut them out to pin onto wool felt.

The circle the head sits on is the size of a cd. That should give you some sense of scale. I cut it out with pinking sheers for the fun of it, you don't need to! After seeing how it looked all placed together, i pinned on the mouth first, and blanket stitched around it, then stitched on the teeth lines. After that I put on the eyes, also with blanket stitch. the iris' and the nose are all buttons. The head and whiskers are all sewn down with silver thread for fun, just one piece of embroidery thread was used, rather than all six. The details are pretty small, so you don't want to muck it up with to much floss!

A view of my studio table with it all out.

And the finished cat! I free handed the boo stitched on top, luckily it turned out! The orange felt is stitched down on black felt on the back, with tree tinsel stitched in between the layers. I was going to stuff it a little bit, but I forgot! Next time I will, I think it would be neat.
And the leaf ribbon is pretty fun too. You can get that at Collage!
I promise, I will put up a PDF of the design, I'd love it if you tried it and let me know how it turns out! And if my directions are clear. I want to design more of this type of stuff. I'm also working on some very cute Embroidery designs. More on that later!

Maggie

Organization of the Image Drawer

2009-10-27T20:34:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a reorganization of my bottlecap images for months now. It involved cutting out all the stuff I didn't like anymore, and then better organizing the images I did like into pages of similar items. You see, when I did this the first time 3 or so years ago, things were not organized on the pages at all: nerds hung out with cats and bikes, peace and skulls and bug cars all on the same page. It didn't really bother me, I got used to it, but it drove Brandon CRAZY whenever he was helping me fill an order. So this year when I reworked my catalog, I decided to rework the cabinet too. Heres how it all finally came together:

This is my bottlecap image drawer:

Ohh, here it is open! The files have tabbies now that give you the gist of whats inside. This is a new addition to the filing system! before, only the holidays had tabs, for some reason. Don't ask me, it might be my system, but I don't know why that is so.

Oh, and here is a blurry picture of the front of one of the files. This was how they were labeled in the past. The images on the papers inside of the file are shown on the front.

And here are all the different colors the images are printed on! Used to be more, but my most favoritest paper company in the world has succumbed to this economy and is no more. So now I have to find all new paper, and well, the color choices aren't as yummy. So sad for me. But I'll make it somehow.

And some bottlecaps all waiting for resin in the cookie sheet. The images get punched out of the above papers and plunked down inside the bottlecap.

And thats how my new improved image drawer is organized! I'm pretty proud of it, and I thought it might give some of you studio organization ideas.

Cheers! Maggie

Papaver Jewelry Webpage Update!

2009-10-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Yep, updated the ol' page this weekend. Whew, its always intense to do, especially when its an all day affair. I had to create a bunch of new shopping cart features, and all the new teeny tiny charms. And then I decided to redo the pictures, so I took photos, edited them, and plunked them in. So the pics with the polkadots are just going to have to be updated as I make new inventory, cause those ones are sold!

And my brother came over and showed me how to upload my stuff to the Internet so now I can update the site as often as I want! Before I would do a bunch of stuff, and then have to get it to him to put online. I think he has a very low opinion of my computer abilities. And while hes not wrong, I can learn!

So go to my page and see whats new and different! And let me know if I should change something, I've already found a few things just looking at it before writing this blog post!

Maggie

Beginning Needle Felting Class!

2009-10-07T21:03:00.001-07:00

I taught my beginning needle felting class at collage tonight! It was a big success! I had seven women, the youngest is pictured below! Her bird had the most features, being as while the other ladies were still busy poking at wings and eyeballs, she had moved ahead and was adding a heart, brain, and belly button. Cause what is a bird without a belly button? I don't know, but I think I may have to start adding them too. How cute is she?

Here are all the birdies together. Its always hard to tell from the pictures, but each bird is very different. Its amazing what different things people will do with the same basic instructions! I love it.

Look at all that felt! They sure had fun digging through it for the best colors.

And last but not least, a closeup of some of the birds hanging out together for the class picture.

If anyone is interested, I'm teaching a needle felted earrings class on the 20th at 6 pm! Go to www.diylounge.com and sign up!

Maggie

Being Thirty

2009-10-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

I don't know if it is just being in your thirties that changes things, or if its just the way time works, but everybody I know seems to be re-thinking things. Brandon quit Blackfish gallery and moved his studio home, and has since been more productive and happier with the results since then. He is also thinking of going back to school and getting himself some sort of career that involves insurance, 401ks, and the like. Which is great news, cause I will NEVER go back to school unless something forces me to. School is not the place for me, it is pure torture!

My friends have almost all recently either gone back to school or are trying out new ventures. My market girls are all re-thinking things too. I guess that after a few years (or eight) you start looking around to see what else there is that you would like to do with your life than make the same jewelry over and over. Not that I don't like making jewelry, cause I do, its just that I want to do something MORE.

So next year I am taking sabbatical from the Saturday Market. I may have mentioned this before, but I can't remember! I feel like my brain has been scattered all over the floor for the last year, and I am trying to pick up the pieces and put it back together, but in a more organized, less cluttered way. Kind of like the super quick studio cleaning job I did last week (very needed, and now I am obsessed with huge glass jars. I want to put my entire studio into organized, colorful glass jars!). I want to throw out the old, outdated and just plain weird ideas in my head, and set out all my good, clever, and just plain neat ideas in large clear glass jars! Just think, an organized row of jars full of thoughts! Good thoughts!

Working at Collage provides me with endless inspiration. I think it is just what I needed to help organize my thoughts (and add whole new mediums to learn, sigh.). The books and magazines, the customers, and the teachers all inspire me to think about what I really like to do, and what I would like to do to make it profitable. Which, of course, is really the only way to make it work. I also get a huge surge in creative juice just by working at Art and Soul. I haven't taken any classes there (I did teach once years ago, may have to do that again...), but just being around all that energy and creative people makes my mind churn with ideas.

So one of the ideas that came to me this morning was to write a craft book. I've got a couple of ideas for this book, so maybe if it get it going, it could be a few books! I know other crafty chicks in the area have done it, so why not me? I love their books, and I think the really fun part of all these books is that they show each woman's personality. So, as a crafty student or person looking for inspiration, they are great because you can put your own spin on the author's ideas. And you also discover that other people love the same things you do. Does that make sense? I think I am trying to say that while there are many awesome craft books out there, there is always room for one more, because it will be different, even if it covers similar things.

One of my thoughts is to make one for the holidays: halloween, thanksgiving, christmas, new years. All the favs. I LOVE to make my own decorations, and they fit in well with the retro and primitive styles that people like, so I think this would be FUN and that other people besides me would like to make them! I'm thinking needle felted ornaments, stitched felt garlands and ornies, paper mache cat heads and skulls... even some embroidery! I'm kicking around some stitched felt patterns right now, and when I get a few done, I'll be passing a few testers out for people to try. Hey, maybe I can do my first ever give away with them! That would be awesome.

The other idea I just had while looking at some curtains I made out of vintage tablecloths. Its a repurposing your old stuff/thrift store stuff book. I'm thinking home decor book that is based on what we have done here. So curtains and pillowcases are the obvious ones, cause that was my inspiration. I'll come up with more later, I just had this idea after all. And yes, I know this has been done before, but not by me!

Alright enough ramblings, I got to go make some breakfast from our chickens eggs, and a pumpkin pie from our pumpkin and duck eggs (Iris is allergic to chicken eggs, and we are bringing the pie over there)! Who knew that someday I'd be pureeing my own pumpkins and making pie from scratch? And with duck eggs? If you had asked me when I was 20, or even 25 I would have said you were dreaming, this girl doesn't like to cook! She likes pie made from a can! Who in their right mind purees their own pumpkin?

Gotta go! Maggie

Robots love Chickens

2009-09-22T12:54:00.001-07:00

See, it says so right there on the painting! I always thought they might love chickens, but I never had proof before. But Laini (who painted this for me) would know, she has a blog called "not for robots," and if she knows enough about robots to know whats "not" for them, then surely she knows what "is" for them!

Laini and Jim took me out for belated birthday breakfast today. I think this is the third belated birthday breakfast with them, but by far the closest one to my actual birthday. You see, we are all terribly busy people (being self-employed does that to a person) and we don't mean to go months at a time without seeing one another, but it does happen. This is a good week, cause I saw them twice already!

They also have an adorable new baby named Clementine Pie, and as Brandon put it "I'd be annoyed with anyone else giving a baby the middle name Pie, but with them, it just fits." And I feel that to be true. And she is cute enough that you might want to make her into pie, just so you could eat her up!

They are doing their best to inspire me to paint, and blog, and join the facebooks. I think I will try on the first two points, but I just can't quite get myself to do the last. Facebook, like Myspace, is just not for me.

But blogging more, I swear, that is my not quite new years resolution, and yes, I know I have said it before! I think its like quitting smoking, sooner or later, it actually sticks.

So for now, I have to go. Just enjoy that painting above one more time!
Maggie

Brandon's 30th Birthday Bash

2009-09-21T16:59:00.001-07:00

Brandon's birthday was last Saturday, and here are some pictures of the evening! Don't worry, that baby at the bottom wasn't really drinking, she's just good at hamming it up for the camera. Cute, ain't she?

All told, don't know how many adults were there, but three kids and eight dogs were partying down!

The end of the night, relaxing with Opal before bed. Awwwww....

Cloudy Morning

2009-09-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hi All, not much to say right now, just thought I'd better get a post up about something! Thank you all for your kind words about the Oscar cat, it was sweet to read those comments. Its funny, the times I miss him most are when he was most annoying: trying to climb into the laundry basket while I was putting the dirty clothes into the washing machine, checking out the wet laundry in the dryer, or attempting to put his dirty self into my lap (or a friend's lap) while sitting outside trying to enjoy dinner. Ahh, good times.

Last weekend I got rained out of the Saturday Market. It was dumping, literally. It was going when I got up at 6:30, and didn't stop til mid-afternoon. It made me really happy, cause I had already called in and cancelled my spot, and that usually means that the weather will cooperate with the vendors who did not wuss out, and be pretty. But this time it just dumped, and made those of us who did wuss out feel pretty darn good about our decisions. And I had a great three day weekend instead, which is RARE for me.

We brewed beer, we built fires, I read a really crappy suspense novel, hung out with the dogs (we had Ruby too, that dog has really mellowed out! Kinda makes me have hope for Opal), fixed the truck (Brandon did that, his first time ever fixing something himself on a car, he was really proud), helped my dad rip up carpet, and made tomato sauce from the garden. Good weekend.

My parents are putting their house up on the market at the end of the month. Which means alot of last minute projects for them, all on a house that is BEAUTIFUL and will sell quick, I'm sure. Its in the Hollywood district, and pretty much on the best street for a kid to grow up on ever. They have lived there for 27 years, and are now looking for a home to retire in (but not anytime soon, they aren't that old!). Its exciting for them, and I'm excited for them, but I am still sad. Its where I grew up, and I will still be spending alot of time in the neighborhood after they move because I have a bunch of friends there. Since my extended family lives far away, the families on this street ARE my extended family. Many of them have been there since I was little, in the case of one family, I am still best friends with their daughter! They are another set of parents for me.

So I will still see the 'hood, but that house won't be mine anymore. Its okay, whoever moves in will love that house too, I just hope they don't do to much crazy stuff to it, I'd never survive!

Oh, and we also made our own ketchup last week! You have to make your own ketchup, you won't ever want heinze again. Its amazing. The sad part is, it takes 4 quarts of tomatoes, and it cooks down to 5 little canning jars. As Brandon put it, these are all ours, we aren't sharing!

Maggie

Oscar

2009-09-03T19:35:00.001-07:00

Rest in Peace Oscar.

I had to have my scrappy outdoor kitty put to sleep this morning. What I thought was just simply another of his bi-yearly cat fight abscess turned out to be kidney failure. My poor baby boy. He spent four days sleeping in his room only drinking water while I forced antibiotics down his throat until he finally was weak enough to not be able to keep me from really checking him out and discovering that he was alot more sick than he let on. You see, Oscar was a street cat before adopting us at our old Ankeny place, and well, he has his own rules for how one handles Oscar. That is, you do it very gingerly if you care for your health.

So this morning he didn't stop me from really checking out his body and mouth, and what I found scared me to death. Scared me enough to say to Brandon before he left for work to say his goodbyes to Oscar now, because I didn't think he'd be coming home from the vet alive. Turns out I was right.

The vet was wonderful. I love this girl vet at Banfield, I've had her before with Marcus (and Oscar) and she has always been the kindest, sweetest person you could ask for to work on your babies. She checked him out, told me it was probably kidney disease but they wouldn't know for sure without tests, and what it would mean to treat it. Basically, it would be days in the vet, followed by IV's at home. Awful stuff for a rough and dirty outdoor cat. Stuff I couldn't do to him. I told her I wanted to put him to sleep. She agreed with me.

I got to be in the room with him and stroke his head as he passed. It was really pretty quiet and peaceful, and he seemed okay with it. He tried to purr for us, he was just happy to be held. It was wonderful and horrible at the same time, and she did a pretty good job of looking me in the eye as I was crying my eyes out pretty much the whole time I was there. The vet tech wasn't so good at it. I kinda didn't like him, although I probably just made him uncomfortable.

Sorry if this blog doesn't make much sense. I've kinda been in tears all day. I had thought about how much easier things would be around here with one less cat to torment the dogs, but now that it's happened I don't think it was worth it.

When Brandon got home he dug the hole for Oscar under the camellia bush. We are going to get a cement cat sculpture to mark his spot.

Oscar was a great cat. He had crazy amounts of personality. Back when we lived on Ankeny, my brother called him the Ambassador of Ankeny Street, because he would walk up to anyone. He used to walk over to the Video store and wait outside and let the kids pet him while we rented movies. He would walk down the block to Cameragraphics to get copies and treats (cat treats) with me. I think that's why they remembered me at all there! I still get copies there, although we have both changed locations. He was a crazy cat, he wouldn't get out of the way for dogs, preferring to make their owners drag them around him when he was walking down the street.

During parties we would always have to go over the "Oscar Rules" with new people, and they almost never believed us and usually got scratched because of it. He loved sitting in laps, but only liked being pet on the head and shoulders. If you wanted to pick him up you had to go straight up and down, no scooping or you'd get swatted. If you were a cat, he'd fight ya.

He went in about every other year to get an abscess drained, cause of all the fightin'. That cat was so gross. The first time it happened he got a drain put in, and had to wear this snazzy blue cape, which is in a picture below. That was when we learned that he was literbox trained. He was also previously neutered, a fact that was unknown to us until we took him in to get neutered, and they knocked him out and discovered that it had already happened once in his life.

So we know he once had people, and then somehow lost them. I had been watching him for about six months before he decided that we should be his people. And it was very much his decision. One day while Ce'Anne and I were gardening (she was my neighbor then) he just walked right up to us and pretty much demanded to be fed. He had a dime sized chunk out of his forehead, and I felt bad for him. We named him Oscar after Oscar the grouch, cause he had this huge oval head on this skinny body. This we fixed by feeding him lots, and he filled out and started looking like a bit of a pitbull of a cat. Before we got Marcus I kinda wanted a blue pit to match my blue pit cat.

I know this is a rambling post, but there is just so much to say about this wonderful, cantankerous cat of mine. I love him, and I miss him so much already. I'm going to stop now, but there are some pictures of him below. Turns out that while I have about 50 million dog and chicken pictures, I don't have many cat ones. And hardly any Oscar ones at all, and we had him for almost eight years.

Here he is contemplating the fertility shrine in our kitchen. Just after we moved in.
And here with his lovely cape. I decided not to show the one with his drain in. Yuck.
Snoozing on Brandon, several christmases ago. This is before Marcus.
And just after we moved in, before he took up permanent residence in the back yard. Him and Cassady, forever separated by screen doors. I don't think they would have been friends. She is to much of a princess, and he, to much of a Bruiser.

Goodbye Oscar.

Collage on Woodstock

2009-08-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

I might have mentioned that I started working at Collage on Woodstock a few weeks ago. Thought I'd post some pictures of the place to prove it, and perhaps to make you all want to visit me, and the store. We sell some pretty awesome stuff there!

Here are two of the three classes I will be teaching at Collage. I haven't quite gotten around to making samples for the beginning stamping class, but I will! The one on the left is the felted bird ornament, the one on the right, felted earrings! I really like how the samples came out, and the stand I made up one morning to display them.

A close-up of the felt earrings. In the class you can make whatever earrings you want, or a pendant or two! I just wanted to make some flowers.

Here's the heart of the store, the middle counter. Here we help people, make cards, samples, whatever! Its command central. I can't wait for the computer to work again, I really want to be able to look up products customers are asking about (or trying to describe to me), as well as check out what other stuff companies make/sell. Like for example, Sassafrass. It has these AWESOME papers and stamps (check out the paper display below), and I want to know more about the company! If I had the internet, I could do that! My brother may be coming in to do some computer work for Maria (she owns Collage, as well as being generally a kick-ass chick).

The drool-worthy gold german scraps. I love this wall, and have no need for any of it. Oh, but I want it...

And the cute stamp section. Not anywhere near as many as I had back in my First Impression days, but they are all adorable. No room for so-so stamps in this store!

And the Sassafrass papers. I love them, I have bought a few, and have no idea what I will do with them, because they are to beautiful to cut up. Sigh. I'll think of something!

So drop in! Come check out the class lists and hang out with me! Its possible that I just might bring Marcus in to hang out too, and be the newest member of the Collage doggie team! There is already Lucy and Chico, as well as a little tiny dog who's name escapes me right now. Yay for a place that lets you bring your doggie to work!

No Opal though, she'd just tear the place up.

Ducklings have flown the coop!

2009-08-13T13:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, well, they were stuck in a cardboard box and driven out to Boring, rather than flying, but still, they are gone!

I'd write it all out, but Brandon did a pretty neat photo blog story about it, so I will just link to it here.

Check it out, its adorable! And Abby is the cutest thing ever, don't ya think?

Home and Life Updates without pictures

2009-08-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

So you'd think I could somehow get my act together and post some pictures! I've been taking enough of them in the past few weeks, all the while thinking about how great a blog post they'd be, but hmmm, don't seem to get around to using that darn PC to put the post together. I'm writing this on the lappy, a Mac, and I don't have the software on it to just dump the pictures from my camera onto it to upload. So, blog without pictures, which I hate doing!

Ah well, that's life. Around here things are shaking up, but in a good way. Brandon recently resigned (quit?) from Blackfish Gallery, which has been his home for five years. And his studio. So last week he moved all his paintings and art supplies here, to our home! Its been a fun process (for me anyway) going through all his art for the last five years, cleaning it out and organizing it. Keeping the really worthwhile stuff and ditching the rest. He took a 350 lb load to the dump! The entertaining (painful?) part was emptying out our new 4 by 12 foot shed we built in the spring, plasticing it all up (dexter would be proud of our plasticing skillz, if you watch dexter you know what I mean), and cramming all his paintings inside. They just barely fit. His studio supplies, on the other hand, are all in piles of boxes on the back patio. Not real sure what to do with those. But Peter just moved his stuff out of my parent's basement, perhaps we could sneak ours in...

The ducklings are grown, and ready to move to Boring. My friend Glenny has some property out there, with a few ponds and lots of trees. Her granddaughter is super excited to meet them. I hope she's not to disappointed, they are kinda wild, since they were raised by their parents rather than by humans. Hope she loves them anyway. They love all animals out there, and have all sorts of rescued cats and dogs, as well as the non-rescue variety. We will be happy to see them go, because while it is cute to watch a small flock of ducks playing in the kiddie pool, smelling them is a whole other thing. Ducks are smelly, keep that in mind if ever you want ducks.

Opal is still growing, shes about six months old now. We are still sticking with pitbull/lab mix, but I did meet a ridgeback/pit mix that could have been her older brother at the market last weekend. But he was a rescue too, so they were also just guessing at his linage. He was cute and well behaved though, which she will be when she gets over her nibbling on EVERYTHING stage. Shes getting spayed on Friday, poor thing. But after dogsitting Ruby through two times of her being in heat, I am more than happy to do it. Dogs in heat are a pain in the butt. And dogs around them are even worse! Poor Marcus doesn't have any idea why he is so excited and drooling, but he is! Ben promises that this will be the last time, he isn't going to breed her (yay! we don't need any more pitbull puppies in the world right now!) and well, its kinda gross. So my poor baby Opal won't be feeling her best for the next week.

I started working at Collage last week ( I think I mentioned that before) and I like it alot. I'm surrounded by creative people all doing their own thing (starting small businesses, traveling, creating, one is even throwing together a pop culture women convention) while working at a great place that they really love. Maria is great, and I like the hours I am working. A few days a week is fine with me. I mostly love that I get a chance to breathe and think while I am there. Sure I am working (making cards and cleaning and helping customers), but it is a more laid back sort of work than I've been doing, and that allows me time to think about what I want to do with my business. I'm going through my own sort of one-woman restructuring process in my business right now. And its about time. More on that later, as I figure it out!

Maggie

Concentrates

2009-08-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note about how I kinda randomly found the blog for Concentrates, what I thought was just a pretty straight forward feed/fertilizer store across the street from a jewelry supply company I shop at. Turns out Concentrates is WAY cooler than I thought!

I went on the "tour de coops" last weekend (thanks mom for watching the booth for me at the market!) and one of the coops (my friend Senna's fav, and Brandon's too) belonged to a couple that is somehow attached to Concentrates. I think shes the manager, or something, I don't really remember now, but there was some info about it in their yard. Anyway, pretty cool, and made me think a bit more about the list of supplies they sell at Concentrates that is currently stuck up on my fridge. Gonna have to shop there more, which will be pretty easy since I've only been there once!

Anywho, I've been getting more and more interested in Urban Farms, and their blog is definitely gonna help me out in finding out more about ones here in P-town. Makes me wish I had more time to spend on the computer these days, but with the nice weather its been work work work!

Which reminds me, I start filling in at Collage on Woodstock today, I think I even get a key! I'm looking forward to it, which is funny cause usually the thought of regular "work" freaks me out these days. I had a mini panic attack when Maria and I were "talking about my schedule," like it means that I will never have free time again. Which is really funny, cause I schedule out all my work anyway! Its really not any different, in fact, this job is probably EASIER than what I do normally! There will be no digging, sanding or moving furniture around! I am just a crazy person I guess.

Okay, gonna get some work done here at home before I head out!
Maggie

Work Day!

2009-07-29T17:35:00.000-07:00

Well, the 100 plus degree weather here in Portland finally forced me to stay home and work today! The last two days I've spent at my friend's parent's house working away getting a new ceiling sanded, then painted, along with the walls, and waxing the floor. We've been working on their house for about five weeks now, and got them to head to the beach for the last couple days so we could really push through those last time consuming bits! While I have loved working on that project, its been consuming most of my time! Today it was deemed to hot to work there anymore, so I got a much needed day at home. The air conditioner has been blasting steadily all day, even though it is set to a pretty high 78 degrees. Whew! When its hot here, its hot!

I've been taking advantage of the unexpected day off working away in my studio, and finally took a break to rest my tired fingers (filing and sanding is hard on them) and take some pictures of whats been going on lately! And some of them are shown below:

Okay, so I didn't make these two felted earrings today, but I did clean up the pictures in photoshop just now! I will be teaching a class on felted earrings in October at Collage on Woodstock, but more about that later. Or go to the DIYlounge wesite and look them up! Lots of other fun classes too.

Below are a few of my new teeny tiny (around a half inch) charm pendants. I am in love with them, and so it seems, are my customers at the Saturday Market. I've gotten into the nasty habit of selling them before I get pictures taken, so they haven't made it onto my website, and they need to! I'd be happy to take custom orders if anyone is interested... They retail in the $32 to $42 range, very reasonable...

I like 'em, hope you do to! Here's hoping the heat wave breaks in the next few days, I don't want to die of heat stroke at the Saturday Market!

Quick update

2009-07-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

So I'm supposed to be working, and I guess I am, but I am taking a short break before painting a cabinet orange (yes, it is work, its not for me, but will be freaking awesome when its done) and starting my bookkeeping (ugh, should have started it in January like I ment to, but whats six months...?). The update:

The two remaining ducklings are growing like weeds. One of them died last week due to a accident on my part. I won't make that mistake again. But at least it didn't die from being killed by a chicken or a dog, and that would have been MUCH worse than my being an idiot. I'd hate for my dog (or any of his friends) to get a taste for poultry killing. And that upstart Almaletta is much better off not knowing that she can kill baby birdies. Not that she wasn't trying. I don't understand that chicken, most of the time. Fortunately, the babies are big enough now that I think she doesn't feel tough enough to take them on.

We still have darling Opal, who is growing like a weed into a darling little dog. She loves her Marcus, and snuggling, and is trying really hard to be friends with the cats. Who of course, won't have anything to do with her. Shes learning sit and lay down, with the added bonus that Marcus will now lay down when you tell him to, and not just when you lead his nose down to the ground with a treat. Somehow, we never got past that stage at dog school. He is a stubborn animal.

The veggie garden is freaking exploding. The squash are threatening to send runners out into the street, and damn the cars. We had to thin them last week, three of each kind was to many. Now with just two of each (four kinds), you can't even tell they were ever thinned. Brandon red up of hand pollinating the flowers, and while you feel kinda dirty doing it, it will ensure pollination. We think we have a lack of bees out here. We briefly considered urban beekeeping, but decided that was a hobby we aren't quite ready for as yet. Instead, we are going to construct some Mason bee houses, and hope to get some to move in. If that doesn't work, we will be buying some in the winter to release in the spring. Mason bees are awesome, google them and find out! You may want your own too.

Okay, that's all here at the kearns/wilkinson urban farm for now!

Ducklings!!!

2009-06-26T10:45:00.001-07:00

Monday was a big day around here. It was the day Lou Lou's eggs started hatching. I knew something was up because all the chickens-who are usually so rowdy in the mornings-were being quiet, and hanging out near Lou Lou's nest. Then I found the empty eggshell pushed out of the nest. I didn't see the baby that morning, Louise was hiding her, but I knew it was there! That afternoon when I got home I found another eggshell. I decided to hang out a little while and see if she'd let them poke their little heads out, and she did!

I almost died from sheer cuteness overload. Ducklings are ADORABLE. Brandon got home and Lou Lou decided to let them get out of the nest, and we got to watch their first wandering steps, over to the waterer. And then it hit me, Oh shit! I need to go buy some baby duck food! I thought I had another week before they came because we are stupid and didn't mark the calender when she started sitting on her eggs. It takes about 25 days for an egg to turn into a duck.

Here they are during that first water trip:

And the eggs left that day. One more hatched that night, the rest are duds. I took them out today, and two of them were chicken eggs! That Prudence, whenever she saw Louise leave her nest, she'd sneak on over there to sit on them and lay her own eggs!

Milton the papa duck in moulting. He is shedding his bright mating feathers for more respectable browns for the summer. I didn't know that Mallards do that.
The whole family enjoying the pond. Notice the ramp I built just for the babies. They found it on their own. Interesting thing about ducklings, they have no oil for their feathers yet, so their mother preens hers into their feathers. That way the don't get wet and they float. When Milton and Louise were babies, we had to dry them off after they went swimming. Sadly, I don't produce the right kind of oil to keep them dry.

And a closeup of the babies and mama.

When these little guys are old enough (end of summer I think), we will be taking them out to a friend's house in Boring, Oregon to live in her pond. They will love it there. And hopefully, when this happens again next year, she will want those babies too! Ducks live for 20 years, so we probably have ten or so more years of ducklings ahead of us! 20 years! I still can't get over that.

Stay tuned for more ducky pictures!

Magpie Chandelier part three?

2009-06-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

So I woke up this morning at the pretty late 6:30 (the puppies have decided to wait until 6:30 or 7 to get up lately. Much better than 5:30), let the dogs out and checked my email. I love it when I get notified that there are comments on my blog (doesn't happen nearly enough!), but I REALLY love it when the comments are from a stranger who found my blog on their own. So I got super excited when I discovered that one of the guys who made my favoritest chandelier in the world not only found my version of it here, but left me a really nice comment about it!

I got a little paranoid about it at first, thinking that they would hate me (or that I wrote something inadvertently rude or snide) for making my own "poor girls" version of their awesome $5000 light, but he didn't. He even left me their web address so I could check out their other work. And let me tell you, you are gonna want to check it out too. That lamp is pretty understated for them.

From what I got from their site, they are four guys in South Africa, and they love recycling junk into crazy chandeliers. CRAZY ones. And they look big too. I'm just guessing here, but I bet those lights they make for Anthropologie are made as they are ordered, or in a really limited edition, and thats why they cost so much! I like the idea of it just being four guys, not the huge lamp factory we were picturing in our heads.

So their company is called Magpie, and they are an art collective of four guys. Heres a link to their site. The couple images I found through google, but if I can figure out our screen capture software on the other computer, I will try to grab a photo or two from their site to post here. But you really should just go visit and be amazed. The things they can do with a plastic bottle are AMAZING.

Okay, go check them out, I'm gonna eat breakfast now. In related news (okay, not really), I'm spending the day laying a brick walkway up to my house. The bricks came from a chimney that Dad had taken down last week at their house. Should be lots of fun; I'll post some pictures of that!

Pictures of the week

2009-06-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Its been a busy week for me! Lots of meetings, outings, and makings of stuff. Usually my weeks are busy, but the things I am busy with take all day. This week was all about things that took several hours at a time, were all over portland, and were with all sorts of different people. These kinds of weeks exhaust me just thinking about them! But it was a great week just the same. The first two days were taken up mostly by my Idle Hands Ladies, four other market girls and I get together once a month to get crafty in ways other than our work. This month was Strawberry Jam. So of course we had to go to Sauvies Island to pick the berries! And the next day was the making of the Jam (turned out to be sauce cause we didn't exactly cook it long enough. Hey, kids and dogs are distracting!). But we know what we did wrong, so its okay, we'll do better next month with the raspberries.

We saw a giant pregnant piggy eating some veggies. Micah is taking a picture of her.

And look how strong he is pulling three flats of berries, that's twenty five pounds!

This is Tuesday while we were making the sauce. Micah is a big fan of our new truck, and Opal's dog crate. He would only let Opal in, as you can see. Marcus got left out.

And so did Ayla.

Sorry ladies, I know you will probably cringe at the picture, but it shows all of you, including Micah's back and Ayla's little polka dotted bottom! And the aprons.

I think that I may love canning almost as much as making beer. hmmm, now if only I could bring myself to killing and plucking a chicken, I think I could really be a frontier girl! Good thing that I don't have to, I love my chickens.

Speaking of which, see if you can find "Natural History of the Chicken." I saw part of it this week on OPB, and it was AWESOME. I'm gonna see if netflix has it, cause Amazon.com doesn't have any available. It puts charming little stories of people and their chickens next to not so cute stories about where your eggs and chicken dinner come from. Makes me feel kinda smug about raising my own eggs, but kinda sick about eating store bought chicken breasts. Oh, to be able to afford New Seasons chicken! Seriously though, check it out.

My Magpie Chandelier!

2009-06-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

So a few posts ago I mentioned the lovely Magpie Chandelier from Anthropologie. And how I was going to make it, cause I didn't have an extra $5000 sitting around in a fancy lamp fund. Its more like I had $20 of change I scraped together, and a serious need to make something frivolous and fun for myself. Since I believe that we all need to take a break from work sometimes and recharge the batteries by making something completely different, that's what I did that week. It was also a week that I really should have been working, but well, when the inspirations strikes, who am I to say "hey, kinda busy, come back later." I am pretty much never that person. I am happy when inspiration comes knocking!

So here is the finished product: I'm feeling its pretty rad. It's a bit smaller than the original I think, and a bit more flamboyant. I used only beads and junk from around the house, most of it are beads I got back in high school, in my hemp jewelry days, so it was really fun to get those out and make something out of them that I would see every day. The rest of it is from various bits of vintage earrings, necklaces, and bracelets that I had collected over the years and hadn't found a use for yet. It is a true magpie lamp in every sense of the word: I filled it with shiny bits that I had been collecting for years.

This is is humble beginnings: everything is hung on wire bead cord and attached with crimp beads or wire to the hoops.
Here's the support structure; six wires more or less the same length. These got tweeked alot as the weight was put on. The bottom wire thing is a wreath form spray painted gold to match the brass rings on top.

Heres some beads added. Oh, and chains too.

A close-up of the main body of the lamp. see all the different things on it?

And of the bottom. All the strings came together on a round wooden doughnut in the middle.
And at the very bottom, a bit of chandelier that my fellow magpie collector (and also Saturday Market cohort) Ben gave me!

All in all, I am seriously in love with this light. The light cord itself is a three dollar and ninety nine cent Ikea cord. I really did spend less than twenty dollars on the whole thing. The thing that cost me is time. It took a whole season of the wire (season two, excellent if you are interested) to make, all told, i spent about 13 hours on it. So if I were to make this to sell, it would end up costing someone about $500. Which is a pretty screaming better deal than $5000! So if anyone out there has $500 in their fancy lamp funds at home, look me up!

Our new Old Truck!

2009-05-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

We found our new truck on Memorial day! Its sort of appropriate, I think, cause we will remember which day we bought it, and because we got it in Happy Valley, just over mount scott, where the military cemetery is. We drove past a sea of American flags, and really, that is more of a celebration of Memorial day than I usually ever have. I said a brief "thanks for your sacrifice and service" to those buried soldiers in my head as we passed.

The new truck is beautiful, as you can see in the above picture. We pretty much knew when we saw him that he was the one, getting a closer look kind of just confirmed it. He is a 73 Datsun 620. And in amazing shape. Sure, hes got some problems, but nothing major, unlike the other $1200 cars we visited! Really, he has less problems than Gus had. His body is in amazing shape, hardly any rust at all, and hes 35 years old!

I stuck Gus' little Toyota symbol on the left side of the grill, to compliment the datsun symbol on the right. We also stuck Gus' metal rack in the truck bed. The bed is shorter than Gus' but I think it'll work out just fine. The cab is freaking TINY. The bench seat had to go, cause it both forced good posture AND hurt your back with its squishiness at the same time. I have no idea how that works. Opal seems to like it though, right now its sitting under one of the trees in the yard. I did some snooping when we pulled the bench out, and someone replaced the cushions that used to be there with cheap foam. That's the squishy part, and the straight back is the posture part. Makes a good dog bed though.Its also got a tiny little racing steering wheel. That's gotta go too, cause you can't see the dashboard through it. You don't know how fast you are going, and since the turn signals don't tick when they are on, you can't see the light that lets you know the signal is still one! Oh, yeah, and they don't turn off by themselves when you turn, so if you don't notice they are on, you just wander down the road like the Enterprise with its left turn signal blinking away into outer space...

So, right now the cab is spotless, and benchless. Did I mention that the seat belts also need replacing? It came with just lap belts. Those will keep you from flying through the windshield, but won't keep you from cracking your head open on the dashboard. So we gotta get new ones of those too. And the breaks need adjusting. And we should probably change out all the fluids. I know this sounds like bitching, but actually I'm really excited about all of this! I'm so excited about this truck that I took the time to wash it (even under the hood!) and wax it. Check out below how it cleaned up, I think it looks great!

Oh so shiny! And the color, while still harvest gold, looks great!

I'm sure I will post more as we get more done. Who knows, perhaps we will be come crazy datsun obsessed people! But that, of course, would mean learning more about car maintenance then perhaps we want to know...

If you have any good ideas for car names, put them in the comments! My mom has already suggested colonel Mustard!

Rest in Peace, Gus

2009-05-15T12:11:00.001-07:00

First off, let me just clear this up now, Gus was a truck, not a person, or a pet. I figure I should get that out of the way right off the bat, because last Friday when I called my dad and brother, I was crying so much that they thought my Marcus had been run over (that would be my dog). But, let me also say that Gus was a truck that was loved. Gus had history. Gus was older than me. And I was not prepared for Gus to be taken away from me in such a fashion. In fact, I was planning on keeping that truck running FOREVER.

A little history of Gus before we get to his end.

Dad had been looking for a $1000 truck for a few months. Mom called me one day when I was a sophomore in college, living in my first apartment. She says, "dad bought a truck." I said "whats it look like?" She replied, "Oohhhhh, you just have to see it." I got over there maybe that day, maybe a day later to see this thing that Dad had brought home. I was sure it'd be interesting since Mom wouldn't describe it over the phone. And well, let me tell you, I was impressed. Its not every day you see your rather conservative father pull up in a sunny yellow pickup truck with peasoup green fenders and a blue stripe running down each side. I was in love. Mom named the truck Gus, and Gus he stayed.

When Dad decided it was time for him to get a real truck, he gave us Gus. I had already told him that I wanted it when he was done with it. There was nothing else like him in Portland. People smile when you drive by. He's one of those vehicles that you notice when you go around town, ya know the type, I'm sure you've got a few favorite old vehicles you see when you are running errands. You wouldn't know the owners, but you know their cars.

Gus was great. He never cost more than $300 to fix, he was just as reliable as any other car I've owned (which, I suppose, doesn't mean much). He could haul anything. He worked as Brandon's work truck for two years, he hauled wood for our woodstove, we loaned him out to friends to get compost in. He did everything we ever asked. I was going to reward him for being so awesome this summer by sending him out to stay with Forrest. He was going to get his carburetor rebuilt, get all checked over, and perhaps even a new tailpipe. I was even thinking about replacing the drivers side door that had been dented by a careless driver a couple years ago. Oh well.

Gus was totalled last week by a 17 year old boy with no drivers licence, no one in the car, and according to relatives, who didn't even know how to drive. His girlfriend for some reason decided to let him borrow the car (to go where, I have no idea), even though her relatives to her not to let him drive it, cause in their words "he doesn't know how to drive." Fucking idiot teenagers, well, both this kid and his girlfriend won't be driving for a while, she won't cause he totalled her car, and he won't cause hes been arrested by the police, and has an $800 ticket for it.

According to the neighbor of mine who called the cops (thanks neighbor!) the kid came screaming around the corner, made a huge wide turn, and slammed the passenger side front end of a freaking suburban right square into the driver side door of Gus. He then proceeded to scrape along the side of Gus until he got past him, then slammed through two of my new raised beds in the parking strip of my front yard until the car got stuck in the last raised bed. Luckily for the kid, he didn't take out our new pear trees planted out there, or Brandon would have killed him when he got home (he beat me home by five minutes). I guess he tried to drive off, but the tire was blown, so he got out and walked on down the street. Thats when the neighbor (thanks neighbor) called the cops, and they arrested him.

I'd like to think Gus died a hero, cause two kids were playing basketball the next yard over, and if the Suburban hadn't hit Gus first, he could have easily gone through the picket fences and hit one of them. So Gus died to save kids from a kid who shouldn't have been driving in the first place.

Rest in Peace Gus, we will find a new truck to take your place, but it just won't be the same.

Hey all blog followers!

2009-05-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

I've started up a new blog all about my outside projects! As in, projects I do for other people. The painting, tiling, gardening, and organizing side of my life is now getting its own blog. Why? You ask? Because its time for it, I answer! It needs it!

As we like to say here at our house "during this time of economic hardship" we've got to keep our options open. Learn to move with the music, as they say, or, follow both your bliss, and a paycheck. And well, instead of taking the more traditional path of say, getting a crappy part-time job (are there any out there anyway?) I've decided to formalize my pretty fun part time work! I'm designing business cards (right after I finish this post!), coming up with a menu of services, and, creating a blog.

my new blog is named "your home beautification specialist" or "your home bs" for shorter. It will showcase projects I am working or or have finished, and give you all an idea of what talents I have to offer. Also, I hope, it will inspire you and your home projects! I'm also starting an inspiration website list, that I think many of you will enjoy, and please, email me with your favorite home improvement websites!

Papaver Jewelry isn't going away. I'm still going to spend most of my weekends down at the portland saturday market. I'm just opening myself up to new possibilities and opportunities!

Maggie

I'm gonna make this

2009-05-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

I am in LOVE with this chandelier. I saw it in my newest Anthropologie catalog yesterday, and I immediately called my friend Anisa to discuss it. She always gets the catalog, I was sure she had seen it. But her catalog hadn't arrived yet. So sad, I did not discuss, but she is on the lookout for it now! The picture above doesn't really do it justice, the one in the catalog had it hanging outdoors, with a green background so you could really see the pieces. I'm gonna link to it here so that you can take a close up look if you want, their website lets you scroll over the images and zoom to really see close up whats in there! Its really cool.

The Magpie chandelier also costs $4800. yep, almost five grand. Its made in South Africa out of corks, plastic flowers, bottlecaps, chains... sigh, its beautiful. But I can't have it. So, it seems, whenever there is a really cool light fixture out there that I can't have, I figure out how to make my own!

Right now I am in the drawing phase, but I have compiled a huge list of things I want to hang from it. I've already got most of them, being as I am a bit of a magpie myself. Seashells, corks, bottlecaps, fake flowers, keys, prisms, trade beads, little plastic people and animals... Its gonna be awesome. I got my light fixture for it from Ikea yesterday, and I just need to go to Micheals to get the hoops and some tigertail to string it up with! I can't wait to get started.

I'll try to remember to take some pictures of it in progress so you can see for yourself how its getting made. I love Anthropologie, I get great ideas for making my own stuff from their catalogs. I also try to buy one sweater from them every couple of years because they sell wool sweaters that last for years, and never go out of style (Just so you know, I don't use Anthropologie only for ideas).

My light is going to be a bit shorter than the one they sell, and I already know exactly where its going: above the yellow leather chair by the window. The light already hanging there is going to move over above the woodstove, and that light that is already there - well, i don't know where thats going yet. Perhaps back to my parents where I stole it from in the first place... I mean borrowed.

Hee hee, keep posted!