Let's Share: The Berkley Blog

James Bond Red Hots

Intrigue!

Today I found this little parcel waiting for me at my desk:

 

 

 

 

We bought a bag of these style of boxes candy treats for a party last week. [Side note: What is the classification for these things?  You know, Lemonheads, Boston Baked Beans, Jawbreakers, etc...do they belong to specific confectionery category? Boxed candy doesn't seem quite appropriate.]  [Second side note: In case you were wondering, the Orangeheads were the first to go among party-goers.]

Since then, I've had a real thing for the Red Hots in particular.  In fact, we still have a mound of this {insert box candy genre here} waiting for anyone who would like to come trick or treating in our living room but that mound has been picked clean of the 'Hots.  So, just when I thought I was out, this little package magically appeared.

Secret packaging + trendy candy desires = good husband!

P.S.  Please don't tell my dentist about this.  I just had my cleaning last week.

This stuff was made in New York City

Well, actually, it was not all made in New York City but it was all found in NYC.

I wanted to show off some of the awesome finds/people we found at Renegade and in the city at large.  I am also highlighting the carpet tiles we decided not to order for our art room floor in the background.

From Renegade:

Well, first of all let me explain that I haven't worn necklaces for years, if ever, because I have this whole phobia of things touching/clinging to my neck.  Have I mentioned this before?  It's bad.  Even Ryan can't usually touch my neck without me squirming.  Well, somehow at this Renegade a light clicked in my head (or neck) and said, "Hey!  Idiot!  You can wear LONG necklaces".  Okay, light.  You are right.  Check this out:

Leaves necklace by Cursive. Let it be known that I want everything Sarah and Jon of Cursive make.  Let it also be known that they are incredibly sweet and charming people.

Keeping the whole long necklace, yellowish colored, feathery shaped trend alive, I also nabbed the last gold feather necklace from Erica Weiner.  (More are available on her website, though.  I won't think you're a copycat.)

Still gold, but not feathery is this THIRD necklace by a vendor whose name I can't recall because the necklace was procured in a frantic last-minute trade during closing time of day two.  If you made Mr. Donkey, please step up and identify yourself.  

The wood magnets are by Wook Woodworking.  (Type that five times fast!)

Charming letterpressed coasters by ________ (I'm hoping Ryan will fill in the blank on that one because he bought them.  Man, we did a bad job of documenting names. This is probably because we had to go to our shopping during the mad little bursts of free time.)

From the "I want everything they make" category again, here is a vase from Kindling:

and here is the vase at work next to another Kindling purchase from Renegade Chicago last year (it's the twig photo holder).

We also bought a couple t-shirts and a poster from Magick Outlaw.  I really liked their booth because it was different from a lot of the stuff you see at Renegade.  A little more "in your face" if you will.  

Black light posters for the indie craft kids is definitely an untapped market.

Other notable acquisitions from other places in the city include:

Top: Handmade bird paper holders from Kate's Paperie

Middle: Books and zines from Printed Matter, one of my favorite shops/ideas in New York.

Bottom: Vintage math glasses begging for me to create a math inspired cocktail.  We got these at Ugly Luggage in Brooklyn (a ridiculously great vintage shop).

I think one of the best things about going to do these big art shows is how you get to immediately get to turn-around and support all the other amazing artists and craftspeople.  Not only does it feel awesome to put your money into good people's pockets but you get to take home great things to boot.  Win-win!

Unflattering times

The last week and a half can be summed up in two words: INSANE PLUMBING. We had one little leak in our basement which lead to a sewer parade of other maladies and pipe based infections.  It was no fun and I would prefer not to spill the details to the internet (you'd probably prefer this too).  It basically looked like this, but dirtier:

The score even hits a little close to home when calculated in dollar bills.  Ouch.

A bit of good news can be gleaned from this incident, however.  The top hit on a google search of "insane plumber" reads: "Fox News Admits 'Joe The Plumber' is Insane."  Ha ha ha.  That might have made it all worth it.

Because the only photos I've taken in the last week are related to plumbing, I thought, for no reason at all, I'd look through our iPhotobooth and show the world what it looks like when you can't wash your hair at regular intervals.

Fun bonus surprise = Ryan's psychedelic trip into after-hours Blazers land!

Actually, something good did happen in the last couple weeks.  We learned that vegan corndogs are, in fact, available in the city of Portland.

We should be back to our irregularly scheduled art updates a bit later in the week. Get ready - a new animal vote is coming!

Stalling with embroidery

Guess what?  Overhauling a room takes more time than you think it does.  Does this really come as a surprise to anyone?  It doesn't come as a surprise to me, despite the fact that I was convinced I could go from dreary to sparkly in 48 hours. 

It's going to take another week or two to get the art room into shape - largely because we have to wait on receiving some of the necessary items (curtain, rug, lamp) but here are a couple things we are up to:

 

You can find Ryan hard at work on creating the new elephant drawing if you look closely in the last photo.

Also of note, I have zero hours of daylight at home in my house until the weekends and I think the room will probably look darn good outside of compact fluorescent lighting. I'm really ready for daylight's saving time.  

After I'm done with this project, I'm thinking about taking up embroidery again.  Well, not really again since I really only did one project about three years ago but I really liked it and I want to do it some more. As I've been mulling this over in my head, what to my embroidery eyes should appear but the "Forget Me-Not" show at Gallery Hanahou curated by the lovely Kristen Rask of Schmancy. All the pieces are beautiful so it's hard to single anything out, but I think these three stood out to me first:

"Tin Can Tap" by Emily Eibel

"My Love For You Is A Roller Coaster" by Nicole Licht

And, I mean, how can you really go wrong with "Set Phasers On Stunning" by Sarah Horton:

Wow.  Just wow.

Ambitious weekend success stories

It's a little past Monday morning so I wanted to check in and let you know that I did not fall victim to peanut butter related poisoning.

In fact, we've had a super productive weekend  - one I've desperately been needing. We got to see lots of friends at Ryan's Grass Hut opening and all the art was spectacular, of course.

You can see most of it posted on the Grass Hut website and if you pockets are feeling heavy, you can even buy some for yourself.  I think the word around the country is that everyone has too much money these days so this works out perfectly.  You can take another peek at all of Ryan's pieces here, too.

After the show we got to eat out vegan hearts out with these two cute friendlies which included a late night stop at Voodoo Donuts for sugar shock, more amigos, and bubble hockey wars.

The next morning we hosted a little brunch for even MORE great amigos and then went to work on transforming our art room/studio.  We moved in last June to a dark and shag carpeted room and had little time to do anything about it.  We've settled for utter yuckiness for the better part of a year and I reached my breaking point at the end of last week.

With the help of Fred and Amanda and their built-in child laborer, we were able to get the carpet up quickly.  In fact, it was so easy that I can't believe we endured potential cat urined shag for as long as we did.  [We did steam clean the carpets but I'm not sure how much good it ever did.]

 

Then came the chore of trying to cover all that dark paint with white and we went to bed with the room looking like this:

Ick. I should probably go take care of that right now.  Man, if I hated that mini-blind before, the white next to it makes it look about ten million times worse.  Luckily this curtain is on its way.

The only bad news of the weekend is that Ryan got pretty sick on Sunday so I've been going it mostly alone and his new animal drawing will be a bit delayed.  [Or else he's a really good faker to get out of helping me paint!]

Hopefully the next time we meet I'll have something similar to pretty "after" photos to share!

Handmade Christmas

I know we're about over the Christmas season hump and we're all ready to move on so we need to show you some highlights of present giving quickly before you're all distracted by making Valentines.

Some highlights from our artsy gifty exchanging:

Ryan commissioned our friend Tripper Dungan, 3D artist extraordinaire, to make me one Otis Redding special.  I couldn't believe mine eyes when I unwrapped it.  I couldn't ask for anything better.  Thank you Tripper!

Ryan has been wanting some type of nerd hero vomiting from Legendary Tiger Hero for a while so I was finally able to make all his dreams come through.  Ding!  Splat.

Ryan got me an Oregon Gentleman, goes by the name Robin, sculpted by a man who goes by the name Scrappers.  I'd been wanting one of these guys forever too.  Ryan was good at keeping mental notes this year!  

Here is the trio of animal prints I procured for Ryan.  Looking at them now, I realize I didn't intend to get so many animals but it worked out well.  I got the top two (Polar Bears by Hisss and Deer by Groundwork/Danna Ray) intending to have them framed over our bed while Ryan was away.  I was pretty happy to find two sets of animals headed towards each other and thought it was, you know, sweet and stuff.  

Well, in case you didn't hear, Portland got hit with mad-crazy blizzard stuff and I wasn't able to get out to get frames and Ryan wasn't able to leave town ahead of me so I never had a chance to execute the plan.  

Actually, I planned to have the Red-Winged Blackbirds hung at the top of our stairs too [Ryan and I consider the red-winged blackbird "our bird".  Is that a little too annoying?].  So, it wasn't the dramatic presentation I had hoped for, but we did get to throw snowballs so I guess it all evens out.

Then, as if all that wasn't enough, Ryan went and got me this hand-painted birdhouse from Ryan O'Rourke whose work I had coveted on Etsy before it sold out.  Ryan (my Ryan) was able to commission a new house from the other Ryan in time for the holidays.  It's amazing what kind of business can happen when two Ryan's are on the case.

I might be getting a "thing" for hand painted birdhouses.  I just saw this one a couple days ago by Lisa Congdon:

but it already sold.  Sad face.  I thought they could have been good house friends.  I'm not much of a collector but I think I could enjoy  a little community of artist birdhouses.  I think the top one would be the playhouse and this one would have been some sort of mail sorting center.  I have no idea why.

Lastly, in an eerie coincidence considering the print I had already purchase Ryan above, Ryan's sweetie mom bought us these handmade porcelain wrestling/hugging (depending on their mood) bear by kg + ab:

I think the bottom one looks like their telling secrets.  I'm going to try to listen quietly to them tonight and I'll let you know what I hear.

Lighting the passageway

One thing we loved when we originally took a tour of the house we would buy is the controversial staircase upstairs.

I think it is a pretty "love it or hate it" passageway due to the fact that it is terribly narrow and bendy and it is virtually impossible to fit furniture up without some serious deconstruction.  By default, our bedroom is all Ikea due its deconstructable nature.

 

I immediately loved it and got into the idea that we would be going up some kind of secret passage when we went to bed each night.  I've even been harboring the idea of creating a bookcase doorway to disguise the entrance...though I'm not sure it will work out spatially down below.  We didn't paint it, either, but I kind of like the way it looks a little like an ice cave with the white floor and the lumpy old plaster dark blue walls.

We'd been looking for the perfect piece of art as the entrance to the cave and a couple of weeks ago we found it and I'm really happy with it.

It gets terrible lighting there (the dark walls don't help) so when I stumbled upon this original by Ian Dingman I knew it was just the right combination of light and "secret passageyness".

 

 

I might mention that I am utterly jealous of Mr. Dingman.  I love his work and you can buy super reasonably priced originals right from his website and it seems like he updates it fairly often (this is not why I'm jealous).  The jealousy come in when I learned he got to illustrate the new Criterion Collection version of Bottle Rocket!

 

How?!?  How is it that Eric Anderson didn't do this one? How does one get an illustration gig for Wes Anderson without being his brother?  I'm so so so jealous.  But happy.  I generally only practice jealousness resulting in happiness as opposed to that green stuff caused by evil.  This cover is spectacular and I can't wait to own it.  That is, I can't wait to own the cover AND the DVD. I think Bottle Rocket is my favorite Wes Anderson movie, actually.  It might be partially based on nostalgia but I'm not going to discredit that.

I have a very big thing for the use of language and communication in the movies. More specifically, I like seeing how characters relate to each other when they can't speak the other's language.  I have realized that this is one of the main reasons I love Jim Jarmusch movies.  Down By Law, Ghost Dog, Dead Man, Mystery Train...actually, pretty much all of his movies have a component of a foreigner trying to communicate.  My favorite part of any movie ever is in Down By Law when Roberto Bernini is left stranded in the Louisiana swamps and he just rattles off a lonely and lost soliloquy in unsubtitled Italian so not even the audience gets to know what he is literally saying.  Unless, of course, you speak Italian.  I've basically decided that I never want to learn Italian because I don't want to ruin the way the scene feels as a foreigner to his language.   Bottle Rocket, too, has some lovely and sweet scenes of interlingual communication/non-communication. 

I'm not sure how a post about a staircase ended up as a tribute to language in film, but there's my brain for you.  Today's lesson: See movies, climb stairs, and learn/don't learn a language.

What's in the bag?

Do I need to keep apologizing for erratic blog posting?  I'm not sure.  It's funny because I always have things to say but I just don't always find the time to say them. Well, usually I say them out loud but it's the whole translation to the blog format that doesn't always materialize.

We've been busy, though. I had that birthday and we had this housewarming/birthday party and I also decided I would like to paint our kitchen for my birthday activity, which won by a nose over going to the beach for the day.  Of course, the painting took days longer than we expected.

Plus, I figured if I had to wait 2-3 years to find out what was in that bag it was only fair for you to wait almost a week.  Thanks to my ultra-sweetie for the blog post and the mini-scavenger hunt and the contents of the bag which were as follows:

 

 

I thought for sure he'd been harboring a buffalo in a suit so I was honestly (ha, get it?) surprised by Mr. Lincoln.  A few years ago I think we were really into the iconography of ol' Prez. Abe which is around the time Ryan started this piece.  I still do but we'd kind of forgotten about it a bit.  Nevertheless, this piece is awesome and it proves a point I always make to Ryan.  He argues that he can't paint.  My position stands firm at "Yes you can!"  I think the evidence speaks for itself in the matter of Painting: Berkley v. Berkley.

In the matter of The Kitchen: Purple v. Yellow, here are the results:

Before (WAY before):

 

After:

Could I have moved that broom and those artichokes?  Yes, I could have.  But I was tired.  Plus our friend Cathy has inspired me to show the house in the regular working state rather than in some weird pristine condition that never really exists.

We painted the kitchen yellow to compensate for the lack of natural light that comes in the room. There are windows but they just face the wrong ways for a good dose of direct rays.  The black door is a chalkboard paint and we're excited to get that dialog going.  I think the flooring will be our next project.  We're thinking dark dark grey.

In regards to the party, thanks too all our excellent friends who came over!  I found the best cups to spread the yellow love around.

 

You can scratch your name, or phrase, into the cup!  Isn't that the best?  Usually we'll do this with some type of marker system but scratch board built right in??  Genius!

Coming soon...some highlights from the annual Berkley drawing portion of the party.  You have got to see the Stax Records drawing by our friend Rob.  Amazing!

P.S.  I'd like to give a special shout-out to Gandolf for the raging fireworks show.  Hot stuff, old friend!

Berkley Biblioteca

When we were looking for houses to buy last Spring I was keeping a really open mind about renovation and restyling.  I had all kinds of ambition for every scuzzy looking place we saw (thanks a lot, TLC!) but Ryan was way more skeptical about the time commitment involved with redecorating.

It turns out his cheerful non-optimism was correct because we've now been in our own home for two months and we are still living in a sea of to-do projects not the least of which is unpacking our luggage from our trip to New York in June.  Luckily the bones of our house are great so it's not like we're living in a bad 1980s remodel.

We're still hoping to find time to do some vintage and thrift shopping for some furniture to finish up some rooms because I have very specific ideas in my head of what I want where.  Anyway, the point of this whole post is that I decided I really wanted a card catalog in our living room.  We had one empty spot on a wall where I thought it could look perfect.  But where to find a card catalog?  Craigslist wasn't helping and Ebay was too much shipping $ to deal with.

But, ta-da!

[Ding!]

Lucky for me, both of my parents are librarians so I threw it out there and asked if either was getting rid of any card catalogs.  It so happened that my mom had one under her desk that she just couldn't bear to junk but also couldn't quite justify in her own house.  How is that for timing?

Now we're trying to decide on how to label the 12 drawers.  We were thinking of naming them with words from a song or book and finding corresponding items to go inside. Any ideas?

Secrets around the house

Everyone, I have a little secret for you.  Well, actually it is Ryan's secret and we can't know about it.  He has had a mysterious brown grocery sack in the art room closet for going on two years now.  Mind you, that means that he moved the sack from our old art room to the one in our new house.  Apparently he is working on something for me because I'm not allowed to look in it, let alone pick it up.  I wonder if it is really heavy?  Or maybe it's crazy light and he's working on a pillow?

It's been in the works for a long time and he never ever has time to work on it.  I wonder if he will even still be interested in it by the time he gets around to completing the project.

I really hate ruining surprises.  In fact, I think the act of the surprise itself is usually the best part of the deal.  This is why it is easy for me, while home from work with a sore throat today, to not even be tempted to take a peek.  

We have one other secret box in our house as well.  My mom made us a time capsule from our wedding and we can't open it until 2025.  What could be in there???  I guess we'll all have to tune in 2025 to find out!

The last time Ryan had a secret project for me it ended up being this incredible earring rack.  He snuck a piece of wood from Dunsmuir, California (home of the best drinking water in the world!) on an anniversary trip through California last year and turned it into an earring rack for me.

I think he hid the wood into his pant leg or something so I didn't see it.  Then he was walking funny and he told me he had twisted his ankle or something.  The sneaky story was very elaborate in its detail.  It must have been because usually I'm onto suspect activity in a millisecond.  None of his pants are terribly baggy, either, so he is obviously a very good sneak.  I can't wait to find out the mystery contents of the brown grocery sack (even if I have to wait another year)!