My weekend at the Portland Saturday Market was so beautiful, and so exhausting. :)
It seems like the construction on the fountain in front of my booth is nearing completion. I eagerly look forward to being able to cool my feet in the water on hot sunny afternoons. And when all the construction is said and done, we will also finally have our PSM Stage back with local musicians to entertain our ears during the day. I can't wait.
Last weekend I flew down to CA on Alaskan Airlines. It struck me that not only did we still get beverages on the flight - we got snacks too!
Today I am sending out a mobile to NYC for a movie production set.
My fingerprints take a daily beating. I don't know how glass artists prevent getting all the little tiny cuts. I don't. Combine this abuse with a black Sharpie pen (I use sharpie on glass to trace lines around stencils and clumsily turn my fingers black) and I've stains the cuts as well!
I made this custom camera strap cover today, with Father's Day swiftly approaching I thought maybe this would be the perfect gift of crafty-goodness to give to my Dad. He loves his camera, and I love mine - and what better accessory than a strap cover! :) And I love to give handmade gifts... so this afternoon my to-do list included whipping up a camera strap cover.
Heres a link to the DIY blog I saw about making a camera strap cover, I didn't really do much of it though, the athletic trim was just the right width that I only had to sew the sides...
Secret Patch you say?! I thought this sounded exciting, and I'd spotted Farmer Don on his farm before. This seemed like a great opportunity to say Hi and get the inside information.
I had no trouble finding Farmer Don and he was a pleasure to talk to and we got to learn a bit about his farm. And this secret patch was worth the trip! It was honestly amazing. The berries were huge and luscious. Warm from the sun and red ripe and juicey. They tasted like strawberry pie.
And on the way I had fun with my camera, experimented with taking pictures from the car. I am constantly impressed by the Nikon D80. I got some great pictures on the road up to Sauvie Island
I like how the blue train car looks against the white silos.
And the beautiful St. John's bridge... and then this house that is right before the bridge, I swear it looks like the house from the movie "Fight Club". I'd love to know the story behind this building, I think its very mysterious and intriguing, totally eye-catching.
I love my new haircut. And I love what the floor looks like after you get a haircut with all the little pieces of hair.
Ginko mobiles have been wisking through my life. Jan and I are working on some more ginko printing later today. 
This latest batch of ginkgo mobiles that Jan and I printed and I put together for this last weekend have birds perching among the leaves. The imagery of the ginkgo leaves, which evokes symbolism of memory as the leaves are used by some herbal practitioners to increase blood flow to the brain, improve attention in patients and possibly slow the onslaught of Alzheimers (although this was proven to be ineffective by multiple studies - I was just checkin this out in Wiki). Anyhow, the little birds in the mobiles are funny - as Jan says "its the auxillary memory for their tiny pidgeon bird brains!"
There is something about looking thru drawers of type. Letterpress equipment is fun stuff to hang around, and there is something about the type in particular that is so delicious to me.
All the little metal pieces in their little compartments in drawers, little bits of ink staining the occasional well loved letter...
I had my camera with me the other day while visiting Jan in her studio. She has a letterpress and many drawers of different type.
and then there is the bag of random type that is waiting on the to-do list to be put away in their drawers, Jan had a name for this bag of randomness... I don't remember it though. Visually this bag is really appealing to me, how the camera picks up on the occasional letter and the pieces that are still inked... it looks like rubble sort of metal alphabet soup :)
By the way, we have played around with using lettering in our glass process a few times, like on this little plate pictured above.
Today was a long awaited long hike for Tim and I. Its been a while since the two of us had simultaneous free days and we made plans to hike Eagle Creek. The plan was to do the entire hike, all the way to the tunnel. For some reason I thought it would be a 4 mile hike, which sounded great. Turns out I completely made up that figure (my brain gets creative sometimes) and its way longer than that.
It was absolutely gorgeous, mostly going up on the way in, coming back down the same trail going out.
The trail was carved out of basalt rock around 1920 and created by Italian designers. Its quite incredible how you easily walk along steep cliffs and meander along-side the Eagle creek. I loved it. Punchbowl Falls (the picture above) was absolutely magical. You had to walk out along some rocks in the shallow water to see this view and when I saw it come around the moss covered cliffs I had to catch my breath. The water is stunning. In the summer I guess people go swimming here, I'll have to come back and see.
It was a long trail, we got tired after about 5.5 miles in (you have to turn around and walk out the way you came) and had a picnic (baguette, wine, brie, prosciutto, chocolate...and water) and doubled back to the car. 
I've been randomly selected to be on the Etsy Community Council.
We cleaned a lot of strawberries and my friend Maggie had her mother's strawberry tool on hand to make things easier. This tool is really neat - super simple and almost ridiculously unnecessary, but really, its awesomeness! It makes plucking off the ends of the berry so easy and simple and fast. No longer will I be satisfied with a mere small knife. :)
Oh my goodness - this is one heavy bucket of glass scrap - beautiful!
The Rose Festival Parade was this weekend - I took pictures of some of the floats in the morning and the kid rides while they were empty before the park opened. 
The view from my booth has been these kid rides for a few weeks now. 
This weekend was the last couple days of "Fleet Week" so there were Navy and Coast Guard ships pulled up to the Burnside bridge. 
Thousands of people come down to tour the ships and check it all out. I walked along the esplanade and took some pictures. There was a time (decades ago) when dozens of big military ships would pull into Portland for Fleet Week and line the river from downtown to all up around Sauvie Island. Girls from farms towns around Washington and Oregon would drive into town to meet the sailors, many women met their husbands during fleet week. Seems different now, only a few ships pull up, mostly right between the Morrison and Steel Bridges. So at the Portland Saturday Market we were right in the middle of the ships. The coast guard did a big theatrical drill on Saturday and put a big helicopter down above the water to show what a rescue mission looked like and create a big cloud of kicked up river water to wow the crowds.
I picked up some boxes today. Oleo the cat inspected the pile before they got put away and ready for shipping. I think I could have fit another 10 in the car... but I thought this would be as many as possible for one run.
I didn't know if Carton Services would have any more for me - and I was so happy to find that they did! Yeah for cheap sturdy boxes lined with pink foam!!
Strawberry parfait in mason jars. Um yummy. They are sitting in the fridge right now cooling and waiting for us to eat them for dessert. I made key lime yogurt by combining Nancy's plain yogurt, sweetened condensed milk and key lime juice.... and I cut up a pint of berries that I picked this afternoon, sprinkled a little sugar on them... I layered with a few graham crackers - bam - key lime pie strawberry parfait. Oh yeah.
This afternoon I had a wonderful time out on Sauvie Island at Kruger farm. Strawberry U-Picking time is in full swing, there were still loads of green berries, but plenty of red ripe ones for eatting and taking home. 
I am sorta a slow picker, there were just one or two good berries in each bush... and some were too perfect to take home. Woop - gotta eat them right on the spot :). But I took plenty home to eat over the weekend.
We filled the car with berries, okay so we could have gotten a few more pints in there, but it was hot and sticky and 90% humidity with random full sun (it was a few hours before a crazy wind/hail/thunder storm hit portland and took the city down). And I won't eat all of those, there were 4 of us picking and we brought home a flat for a friend to make jam with. I just picked 5 pints, cost me $7. (we were "silver pickers" just 3lbs shy of the "gold pickers" discount and too sweaty to go back for more)
Update: the key lime pie strawberry parfait was so so very tastey, we gobbled them up! You could hear our spoons rattling around in the jars scraping out every last lick of goodness... the graham crackers turned into cake-like layers from soaking up juices and expanding and the sweet/sour combo is just oh so tastey!
One bucket of scraps of colored glass. In the future these bits will be miniature mobiles. For now It's one full bucket of dirty scraps (although it sorta looks like a bucket of candy to me).
I know its summer when I have to break out an extra pair of comfy shoes to have at the shop. You see, in the summer I gotta let my feet breath, so I wear leather flip flop kinda things, but at the shop there is a rule that artists have to wear closed toe shoes (makes sense, you could go dropping sharp glass on a bare foot and then you'd have to go to the hospital, shoes slow the glass down considerably, no feet cuts for me). So in the summer I leave a pair of shoes and extra socks at the shop.
By the way - shout out to little baby Orson - thanks for the nail polish :) see I painted my toes!
Here are all the materials and supplies I used... both cats came out to help me :) (not pictured is a bucket) I use a hanging plastic planter that I've drilled a large hole in the bottom and a piece of flat foam that I've cut a slit and a small hole in the center.
I put the foam around the base of the tomato plant, cut so it was bigger than the hole in the planter. This is not necessary, but it prevents any dirt loss and just makes life easier for the tomato plant.
I stood the tomato plant up on the bucket (the bucket was turned over) and brought the planter down over the starter... slowly started getting the delicate plant thru the hole. This year I only lost one little leaf. In past years I've surrounded the plant in a tube of paper and/or put a bag over the plant to protect it from going thru the hole... but honestly its easiest to just be careful and slowly get the plant thru the hole with no special tricks
Once the whole plant was thru I was able to just rest the pot on the foam circle...
Then I flipped the bucket over and stood the planter up in the bucket with the plant resting unharmed inside the bucket
my starter was not so tall which made this was possible, in past years I've needed a helper to hold the planter while I fill it with dirt before I hang it...
You can see the plant sits happily upside-down on the piece of foam
I filled the pot with some organic potting soil...
And then re-arranged the hanging chains so I could pull the plant out of the bucket and hang her!
Day 1 2009 Upside-Down Tomato
