Snow on Oaks

As promised, we had several inches of snow on Thursday and I had a snow ball fight with my fellow students (MFI-ers) and a gorgeous walk in the woods today before leaving Lied Lodge and Nebraska to fly home.  This has been a phenomenal experience for me and an invaluable investment in my professional (and I would say personal) development.  I feel incredibly lucky.

The front entrance to Lied Lodge.

The Morton Oak at Arbor Day Farm.

Over the river and through the woods, from Lied Lodge to Arbor Day Farm we go!

One of many quotes in the lodge from J. Sterling Morton, founder of Arbor Day.

The lobby of Lied Lodge.  What an amazing place to spend a week!

Visit from Jaja

Jaja came to visit this weekend and we had a blast!  We went to an incredible workshop at the Center for Art in Wood, in Old City where we created a "cabinet of curiosities" out of a cigar box and with great instruction and inspiration from the staff at the center.  We created a portrait for the front, and of course I chose to draw my cats.  Yes, I'm a cat lady.  I really like how it turned out:

 

They had great supplies for us to use, and the boxes already had elaborately patterned paper around the edges that we could use as a jump off for inspiration.  Apparently cigar stores just smash these boxes and throw them in the trash, so it's easy to get them if you're there at the right time.  Which I will obviously be doing now that I know how beautiful these boxes are without any decoration at all.

 

We also went to a work day at Farm 51, which is run by my friends Andrew and Neal.  We destroyed some raised beds and harvested broccoli, then had a bonfire and ate delicious home made coffee cake and cookies.  Their house next door is gorgeous and another constant source of inspiration:

 

 

 

An amazing and inspirational weekend and a great way to start the new year!

Daily Inspiration

From an ad on the side of a bus shelter.

Resolutions

I'm making some common ones - exercise and time management. I was out at a work holiday party last month and I started talking to the wife of one of my coworkers. We were chatting about our morning routines and I laughingly admitted that I set my alarm for 6 am every morning and hit the snooze for an hour and a half. Her joking response was "so you start out every morning disappointing yourself."

Wow. It was a joke, but it hit me hard. I set my alarm every morning with a good intention that I never follow through on. It's a small thing, but it sets the tone of my day and it's a simple thing to change. So with that floating in my head this holiday season, here are the concrete things I plan to do differently in 2012:

• Get out of bed when the alarm goes off at 6am. Duh. I've been doing it for two days now and I actually arrived at work this morning at 7:50 AM (see the evidence in the picture above, taken in the front room as I was leaving the house). This means that I can leave at 4pm and get an extra hour to an hour and a half of stuff done in the evening. It's a new year's miracle.

• Do something good for my body every day. Even if it's just a brisk mile and a half walk on my lunch hour or twenty minutes of sit-ups in the evening.

And that's it. Just two little, manageable resolutions. With just two, I think I can manage not to disappoint myself.

P.S. I was greeted upon leaving the house this morning with a little dusting of snow, which promises to melt by mid-day. Mother Nature, let's have much more of this please.

Tons of tiny icing flowers

We're going cake tasting today! I was told to bring photos for inspiration and color palette. Maybe something like this?



With lemony cake, sugary icing, and tons of itsy bitsy flowers?

I made this on Style Me Pretty. There are lots more, if you're interested.

Patience

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize
how close they were to success
when they gave up."

- Thomas Edison, 1877

A little inspiration and encouragement that is sorely needed right now.

More Corners

We had another turnover in our house, with one room mate out and another in. And as is custom with me, I'm trying to deal with the mess by focusing on the corners of my home that I do have control over. So here are a few of my favorites right now.



This is a corner that keeps changing. The stack of books is revolving of course, but I'm also adding and subtracting the art around it (mostly adding). This is my bedside table and it still has the wonderful, inspirational "Yes" from Nicole and the "E" I found on the ground on the campus of UC Davis way back when. But I've also added an adorable cross stitch that my friend Emily sent as an engagement gift ("Home's not merely/four square walls. Home is where/affection calls."), plus a very happy Phalaenopsis orchid from my parents, two blue birds I picked up at a garage sale for 50 cents each, some mounted butterflies that M gave me as a gift way back in the beginning of our relationship, a Nikki McClure print that makes me smile, and a ceramic butterfly that I got at an incredible store in St. Louis when I went to visit Jaja. I also have a wonderful supply of soft, old, flower print pillow cases that I collected during college from thrift stores that makes my bed a little more colorful.




This is my craft supply corner. It needs some work.



And this is my favorite house plant. It's a Dracaena that I saved in college - someone had dumped it on their porch and it had survived a snow already before I grabbed it and brought it inside my house. And it has rewarded me with years of crazy Dr. Seuss spirit.

I hope your space is also bringing you joy in these dark winter days!

And so it begins again . . .

I got my first seed catalogue already!! I'm not quite ready to look at it yet, but pretty soon I will be scheming about potatoes and peas . . .

Rekindling the Fiber Love

I've been fiber-inspired recently because I found this hilarious podcast, The Knit Wits. It's a husband and wife team who podcast out of Tennessee and have a wonderful repore with one another. They usually end up talking about lots of things other than knitting, like "what's in your wine glass?" and these pirate stories that the husband, Rick, tells (he's in radio/voice-overs and you can tell by his incredible voice).



So dug into my stash and pulled out a beautiful Malabrigo yarn in fall-type colors and started a cowl. I had to unwind the boring one I started a few months ago to start this new one, the Califon Cowl by Lelah Olender.

I also dropped by Rosie's Yarn Cellar and Loop, two great stores here in Philadelphia to bulk up my staff. I got a great deal on some Koigu yarn in a beautiful seashore color (four skeins for $20!).



I also picked up a simple sock pattern and some yarn to knit my very first socks! Wish me luck, I'll need it.





Oh, and of course I'm on Ravelry where you can see the shameful WIP that I started almost a year ago, the Balthazar Vest.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!

Exciting news everyone!

My garden/farming partner Nic and I have decided to take our partnership one step further and start to brand ourselves and write our own grants with the goal of (sometime in the future) being able to support ourselves on our urban agriculture projects alone!

It's an exciting step, and it's actually a process we started back in August. The first thing we did was talk to our non-profit partners and tell them what our goals and intentions are. UC Green offered to be our fiscal sponsor, which we are incredibly glad and grateful for because we can use their non-profit status to write grants. And we've written two grants since then and been awarded both of them! They are both small community grants (and most of that money goes towards materials for specific projects), but still!

And of course we needed a name and a website to feel legitimate. The name took some brainstorming, and we thought long and hard about it. We came up with "Philly Rooted," and we had our friend make us a logo:



Rad, right?

The website development took a little bit longer, but we finally got it all together: www.phillyrooted.org. Check it out and let me know what you think.

This also means that I will start posting more of my farm and garden posts there, in addition to posting at Farm to Philly. I will try to keep this blog up-to-date with my knitting, making, baking, and thrifting activities. The fall weather (and upcoming "holiday season") has me back into my knitting, which I will post about next week (I just got some beautiful yarn and might even try a pair of socks soon!). I also just found this adorable podcast The Knit Wits, which has got me all fiber inspired again.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Corners of My World

A while ago I posted about the corners of my home, but as I was out walking the other day I realized that there are a lot of little corners that are special to me, some of them outside of the home. So I've set about to document them (after all, isn't that the whole point of writing a blog?).

This is a wall that I pass all the time on my way to the St. Bernard Community Garden. It's been decorated with chalk, and if any of you have ever used chalk on brick you know that it doesn't easily come off. I think I'll be appreciating this wall for a long time.



This is a vacant lot that I pass on my way to work in Camden. I'm not sure if those steel beams were present in the house before it was knocked down, or if they were put there afterward to help the surrounding buildings from following suit. Either way, I want to put a garden there really badly.

This is just a moment in time along the walk to the St. Bernard Community Garden.

My friend Nicole recently wrote a thought-provoking post on her blog, Blue Bicicletta, about appreciating each moment of the day with reverence. It's a word that doesn't get used that often, and it's really quite beautiful. To quote Nicole, "my pocket Webster’s dictionary defines reverence as: awe mingled with respect and esteem." I think we could all use a little bit more awe and respect in our lives. These little corners of my world allow me to be awed by the art of every day life, and to live that life a bit more purposefully, with reverence.

Terrain Terrariums

There's a store about 45 minutes away from me called Terrain, and it's run by the same people who do Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters. If you like that stuff (and I DO), and you are a gardener (and I AM), you, like me, would just faint dead away when you saw the things they have for sale at this place. It's like home-and-garden porn.









And they specialize in terrarium supplies, which I happen to be slightly obsessed with. See my post about Z's terrariums at her family home. She scoffed when she heard that I had PAID to attend an entire workshop on the topic, but that I did.



It was taught by Tovah Martin, who has written a coffee table book called "The New Terrarium." While she was talking I had the distinct feeling that both she and I were of a different world than the people who were about to spend over $100 on their terrariums, and how in the world did we get here? But it was fun, and I managed to spend relatively little on my two terrariums.



Her basic recipe includes stones (for drainage), charcoal (to purify the water), container mix soil, and plants. Pretty simple. And to be honest, I think the only things that are necessary are the soil and the plants. It's a widely spread myth that putting stones at the bottom of a container helps with drainage, it doesn't.





The stones, charcoal, and soil came with the registration fee, and they had some fun little pieces of nature to add to the container, which I did, liberally. But the plants and the "glass vessels" were extra, and it was easy to get carried away (my friend spent about $75 on her terrarium). I made one terrarium while I was there, and then prepared another one for home . . .



. . . because I had this special guy to put in it! It's a pitcher plant (Sarracenia sp.), native to our region, that I got from the EPA's flower show exhibit for free! They are kind of difficult to grow indoors, but I'm going to try.



So the verdict is that Terrain is amazing for inspiration, but not so amazing on the wallet. Not that I won't go back.

The Corners of My Home

We're in a state of transition here on Osage Ave; two of our housemates recently moved out (three if you include Wild Bill), and two will be moving in over the course of the next month. The house is in disarray and there are boxes and newly empty walls all over.

This recent post from Soulemama allowed me to take a breath, look around my home, and appreciate the parts of it that are still making me happy.

I also joined the Corners of My Home group on flickr, which provides some very nice procrastination fodder.

*** Favorite stuffed animals (Beanie, Flat Cat, a wild thing, and the Phanatic), pictures, a self-portrait I took in college, nick-nacks. ***

*** A favorite spot in the front room, with a bird's nest that was a gift from my mom ***

*** Winter on the south side of the house - on the right is my pineapple sage which makes me very very happy. ***

***Nick-nack corner with my jewelry box from Poland, ring holder (my first engagement gift), striped rock from Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, and art from blue bicicletta. ***

*** My favorite bread-rising place ***

***Part of my sweetie's studio.***

***Bedside table full of things that make me happy.***

*** Furniture from my grandmother, a print from my time in Hawai'i, Steelers fanstuff.***