Azienda Agricola Arpisson, Part 2

The goats returning home for milking and bed

The farm is a two-hour hike from a grocery store, so all the food non-dairy we ate was helicoptered up at the start of the summer

Skimming the cream...for butter or coffee!

The one-room kitchen/bedroom where Eve and I stayed. Even when it was super hot outside this room was always magically cold.

Calves :)

All my posts about this sublime place are here!

Calf birth at Arpisson

I made this little video today, featuring Marion the calf.

picnic with a kitten

following closely on the tail of the world's best puppy,
here's a fall picnic in mccarren park with poppy seed the kitten.

world's best puppy

some film photos from the fall of rory, the mini australian shepherd who lives in crown heights. (eve was her babysitter during her earliest puppyhood.)

diy rubber stamp business card (on rubberstamps.net!)

Because I am trying to convince myself to embark on a photo project that would possibly involve asking strangers for their photo, I decided it's time to get some business cards. Plenty of stationers sell customized business card stamps for like $80 each. But I wanted to do my own. If you start Googling this topic, you'll quickly find RubberStamps.net. It is not a very beautiful website but these guys know what's up. This was the most fun I've ever had on a DIY project.

1. Draw and high-quality scan your design.

I just used a pencil and pen and drew a goat inspired by one in the Pictorial Webster's. (Rubberstamps.net also lets you format in some text online. I also considered printing out the words and gluing them on before scanning, but chose to write it all myself.) It wasn't necessary to draw it as small as an actual business card (2" by 3.5") but I just wanted to be able to visualize it.

2. Upload.

I thought this was going to be a huge problem because I didn't know how to change my image into a pure black and white thing with no "noise" from the paper or anything...turns out their unbeautiful, genius software just figured out exactly what I wanted. Here are all their wood-mounted options. Mine was $23...which is great as far as business cards go!

3. Wait around for them to mail it to you. Mine came in 6 days. Awesome.

4. The one thing I'll say about the stamping stage is that you don't have to press as hard as you think!

the paper source has a big selection of blank business cards.

you can also choose to add a wooden handle on, but i thought it would be easier to stamp this way.

When Eve came home and saw all of them, tears actually came to her eyes, which was pretty much how I felt too.

ps. another recent budget fun diy.