Every night the past three days, as I’ve read Reeve Lindbergh’s book (beautifully illustrated by Jill McElmurry) entitled Our Nest, I’ve reflected on our health and good fortune to have each other and a home to return to each day, when we are tired and weary.
I don’t know if this blog entry will reach many people, but if you read this and have three to five hours of free time this month, I have found a wonderful way to share some skill and love with the evacuees and their children, who have very little “nest” to speak of. It’s a project called The Linus Connection and the mission is to “provide a handmade security blanket to every child who is in a crisis or at-risk situation in Central Texas.” If we are able to meet the basic needs of the evacuees, I think this would be a loving addition to the effort to help mend lives and offer warmth.

Austin’s News 8 featured this initiative a while back. To describe one benefit of the mission, founder Stephanie Sabatini offers:
“What we’re trying to do is provide security. This is something handmade that the kids know that people in the community are thinking about them, hoping for them and hoping that their lives get better perhaps than they have in the past.”

I love this bug jar block quilt. A six year-old friend of ours received one of these himself, as a gift. It’s adorable, just like this one:

Inexpensive is good. Cheap is better. But at what cost? Photojournalist Michael Wolf has documented the flipside to the euphoria of cheap and returned my thoughts towards weekend garage sale shopping and the recycling of consumer goods.

Once again, I was squandering away a perfectly good hour of sleep when I stumbled, falling completely in love with the designer Josef Frank, by the kitschy beauty of his supernatural textiles on display at Stockholm’s Svenskt Tenn. I was ready to pack a few days worth of clothes with my toothbrush and board the next flight to Stockholm before realizing that:
a. not only was he, to my disappointment, already dead, but that
b. my youngest child was sitting up in the bed, screaming for me to pick him up.
His designs seduced me as Feodor Rojankovsky’s illustrations first did, when I was a very young girl, in the pages of John Langstaff’s Frog Went A Courtin’ and Over in the Meadow.

Even if the the plan backfired and these stickers became a commodity, I still think the You Are Beautiful campaign is a lovely thing.

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Every evening for the past week we have been going down to the lake to play. The breeze coming off the lake is cooled by the water, so much that it almost feels like Fall as the sun sets, but the heat rising from the sunbaked asphalt dries our suits by the time we reach the car on our way home.
On the curb sits a five foot-high pile of empty fireworks cartons, colorful and littered with tall exclamatories and hazard signs. The head of a black cat, on one box, hisses at us; he is the hero atop the technicolor caricature of a trashpile, much like the head of a lion in a taxidermist shop.

I’ve been browsing some wonderful little paintings by Amy Ruppel, another bird/egg aficionado. These are so buttery! I want to touch one–I believe they have a layer of wax embedded in them somehow? I’m hoping to hear back from Amy on her technique. FUN!

How cool!
Amy sent me this in her response (thanks, Amy!):
I use beeswax, indeed. I cover a piece of wood with wax I’ve colored with pigment, then collage on top paper birds and shapes I created digitally, then layer clear beeswax over that… then I sometimes (most of the time) draw back into the wax, and fill the lines with oil paint, then wipe the excess away. A quick pass with the propane torch, and it’s set in for eternity. Have you taken an encuastic painting class? it’s so much fun, and very rewarding. It’s such a forgiving medium, full of happy accidents!