around our apartment

in beautiful bed-stuy brooklyn.

walking around

a visit to clyde jones

clyde jones is an outsider artist who lives in bynum, north carolina. my mother is a folklorist so we used to visit him when i was a kid, and recently i had the chance to go back again. he told us to come back any time because everything's always changing. here is his website of sorts.

his paintings are beautiful but the best are these animals made out of logs, often with silk flowers for eyes. clyde only has nine fingers because he cut off one with a chainsaw. my favorite clyde jones story is that once a museum was planning to show his work (relatedly, you can go see some of his pieces at the american visionary art museum in baltimore) and the curators came with a truck, padding, gloves on, etc., to transport his work with the utmost respect and care, but one of the animals wouldn't quite fit in the truck, and the curators tried it this way and that, being oh so very careful, and then clyde came out with his chainsaw and just cut the thing in half. 

my mom's map for finding clyde's house--not so helpful, actually (but bynum is about one neighborhood big)

"the north pole is melting so santa done got hisself a new canoe"

eve

this rotting/back-to-nature swan makes me feel both sad and happy

that's me

clyde on his porch

 afterwards why not drop by allen & son...

ps last year and the year before.

favorite spring fabric trends, and some shopping in manhattan tips

anytime i have anything vaguely stressful to do in manhattan (and every possible reason i might have to go to manhattan is stressful), i wind down afterwards by going shopping. i don't always buy things (though i buy a lot more than i need), but it is very soothing to touch all the different fabrics and think about the future.

so here is your trend report (click through if you dare):

up and over

 the williamsburg bridge

on one of the first warm days of the year.

ps different bridge, different weather.

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.

early spring in brooklyn and manhattan