the Garden of Leah

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Rearranging My Etsy Shop

Ooooh you can now see my re-arranged shop!!! (I think - go check it out and let me know!)

Its sort of like getting to arrange the items in a store front - can you imagine having a little store and not being allowed to rearrange things! Up until now Etsy sellers would "relist" an item to create a desirable arrangement of items - as in sellers would pay (just $.20 but still) again to list an item they've already paid to list, just to bring it up to the top of their shop... not any longer!!! Now you can click a little button that says "rearrange your shop" and fiddle away.

They finally released this feature, I've been part of the Beta Testing... heres a little video about the beta testing, kinda shows what the feature is like.

More Pictures from Dad

I thought I'd share some pictures of my Dad's wood shop. His basement "Man Cave" as he calls it. He lives on the other side of the country, otherwise I would be hanging out down in this basement with him. :) Instead he hangs out down there on the weekends (without me!) and makes wonderful things like boxes and tables.

Current project: a cribbage board box

Both my mother and father are creative people... my dad is an engineer/businessman by day(he works with huge turning machines that make car parts among other things) but he always has had a wood shop in the basement. I really enjoyed growing up with furniture that he made and a shop in the basement with all sorts of cool tools. Hes good too - I could go on and on with lists of things that hes made over the years. Love you Dad!

The following pictures are labeled by him... I had to include the labels :) As you can see hes an organized kinda guy (notice the pegboard behind the workbench, he would always know when I had "borrowed" a particular tool...everything has its place)

primitive man cave

workbenches

tablesaw

original workbench 1975

Incra router fence

drill press, belt sander, Bulldog router table

DeWalt planner

1 Micro dust filter

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Pictures from Dad

My dad sends me pictures all the time (we use Picasa), and while I love getting to see photos of my family, what I love more are the pictures of mushrooms! For realz, pictures of mushrooms. He has always been one to email me the odd picture of some 'shrooms. He'll go on a hike and send me pictures of fungi. Yep. So here are a few that I received today - totally rad.

this last one is huge! the above shot is a closeup of the shot below

Back from My Trip

Here I am sitting on the beautiful Clackamas River... playing my orange Ukulele. It was so nice to wake up to the sound of water flowing in this river and there were two blue jays playing in the trees around us. In the morning while Tim made tea and played with the campfire, I went down to the river and sat on the rocks and played with my Ukulele (there was also plenty of fire-side Ukulele time, but I have no picture of this) I can now play the Beatles song "Honey Pie" while singing along, sorta :)

Here's our campsite at Kingfisher, this is the closest camp to Bagby Hotsprings and it was really a little piece of heaven. We camped right on the river and it was quiet and private. We drove over to the Hotsprings parking lot late at night and hiked in the dark (this was a first for me - I knew they had candle holders in the tub rooms, but I'd never been there at night) and it was actually very nice. It was not scary and the people there were the same goofy crowd that goes during the day (I was apprehensive). In fact it was kinda crowded! We stayed till about midnight and then hiked back out. The one thing I didn't like about the night soaking was that it was harder to apreciate the amazing beauty of that hike when it was dark. Even with flashlights and a big bright moon it was still not as pretty as during the day.

Pancakes on the fire. They were spectacular (Bob's Red Mill 10 grain pancake mix)

I used to use that blue camping chair in my booth while vending my artwork... the cup holders in the arms are full of these weird little religious cards that this guy used to hand out on Sunday mornings. I would always just take them and stuff them in the cup holders. They are sorta weird, they have a little message on the front and then the cardboard is perforated and once torn open there is a saying on the inside and a scripture on the back of the flap... and a picture of a duck or a puppy and things like that. I just thought I'd throw in that little tid-bit of random info for all the fellow vendors of mine that might read my blog. Remember these little religious cards?!

This video is just me playing around with the camera... we had a lot of fun hiking the river, at one point Tim found a spot he could cross it and I caught it with my continuous-shot picture action :)

Weekend at the Portland Saturday Market

This last weekend was fun times at the Portland Saturday Market. Here are a few pictures... sorta a day in the life of a vendor :)

In the morning on Saturday the streets at 3rd and Ankeny were closed off and I went to check out the mayhem (a DJ on a big painted hummer truck thing? lots of kids in soccer outfits?) and turns out there was a mini soccer tournament going on. 3-3 soccer games in little plywood squares set up in the street, it looked like fun! (I want to say this might have something to do with the fact that Portland has bought itself a soccer team? Maybe they are trying to drum up more enthusiasm for soccer? Or maybe it was just the traveling tournament? who knows)

Friends came to visit the market, it was a busy sunny day... here is Joy visiting with Naomi and Erin...

and Maggie finished this beautiful embroidered towel

now that we have a stage again at the market I have been enjoying the music very much! This guy was great, a one-man-band of sorts (he had one of those repeater foot-petal gadgets, I love this kinda of music) Heres a link for his work, American Nobody

And then in the evening on Saturday there was the annual Portland Saturday Market Vendor Party. Oh yeah baby. Potluck, Rogue beer, games for the kids (of all ages) and a Mexican theme to tie it all together.

I must say - this years vendor party had an incredible turn out! It was so wonderful to see so many vendors bring their families and stay after working hours to enjoy our new site and socialize a bit with each other. We are a huge group of lively people!!

There was a food contest of sorts for the pot-luck affair - lucky winners received PSM tee shirts and stuff like that.

Erwin brought his ceviches - ooooh they are soooo yummy! There was so much food, but I just had to give a shout out to the Chilean ceviche and the tamales!!!

There was a pinata for the kids

This picture is just a few of the kids right before the pinata thing started. There was a big pack this year and man they swarmed that beaten pinata when the candy started to fly, it was like Lord of the Flies or something up in there!!! And my booth was right next to the mayhem! I had shredded pieces of pinata decorating the floor of my booth the next day! I'm just glad they didn't do the beating right in my booth, instead the line of impatiently waiting kids was housed by my booth, the pinata was hung next door in Tom's booth. Lucky Tom :)

I noticed the kids were kicking around the Elmo pinata head for the rest of the night.

Another brilliant game was the "Tortilla Toss". That was fun! We wrote our names on a tortilla and then stood in line to chuck the flattened corn as far as possible. We used the new waterfront esplanade, only one or two tortillas ended up in the river to feed the birds (and we dutifully cleaned up any scrap of mess afterward on the esplanade). I do believe that Rob (Spoiled Cat) won the Tortilla Toss. He claimed it was his frisbee golf skillz at work, also he said that everyone else was holding their tortillas too much and getting them warm, he kept his on top of his head so it would stay cool and stiff, therefore catching more flight time :) Ahhh the technique. I liked how Tony crumpled his up into a little ball and tried to chuck that, but it was so brittle that it all fell to pieces and flew around like shrapnel.

Here is a good picture of Rob and his winning fling (and you can see the tortillas on the ground)

There also was a game of "Musical Squares" - I won me some hot sauce! Thanks Jeff for modeling my winnings :)

Plus I must add - Charlie took a LOT of great pictures of the vendor party, and hes uploaded them onto Facebook: HERE its funny to see all the pictures of Jimmy with vendors (that's Jimmy Hendrix of course!)