Family Photos

There’s this hilarious photograph of my father, uncle and grandfather taken when dad was 13 or so.  He’s smiling, small and blond, and the other two are massive and severe.

Also dad’s shirt is a comic strip.  So good.

The photograph inspired this little doodle awhile ago.

My father is not pictured in the doodle.

 

Here’s a Christmas card I found last year while helping my Grandma clean out her basement.

My grandpa was so awesome looking!  Here he is, looking awesome again!

And here he is as a child in a cornfield in Sweden.

We all loved him very much.

Lake House Sign and Lizard Friends.

My desk is next to the window in the living room.  It’s probably the place in the house that gets the most light, and I like to sit there  in the sun with a cup of tea during the afternoon.  Plus, I have company there- two lizard friends that like to bask in the sun as much as I do.

They’ve hung out around the window for several months now.  I actually just realized the other day that there are two, not one, when I moved the curtain to take a picture and found another behind it.

I googled “little lizards”, and I think they’re called Anoles.  I like them very much.  Is it odd that bugs in my house freak me out, but I’m perfectly happy to sip tea next to two little lizards?  I guess they eat bugs, which is nice of them.

I assume they know how to get out if they wanted to….right?  I mean, how did they get in?  I’ve been imagining this cushy indoor life they’ve lucked upon, but maybe they’re sitting on the windowsill mourning their freedom!

My mother-in-law kindly sent a photograph of the finished sign in her house, so I’ll show it off to you.

I’m pleased with it.  I like the fur and the peaceful look on the fox’s face.  Next summer when we visit the cottage, I’ll photograph it in it’s final resting place.  In norwegian, it says “Welcome to the Lake House” and then in french, below, “One dreams here.”  I remembered how much I like wielding a brush while painting it.

Screen Print Bookplates

You can purchase the items featured in this post in my etsy shop.

Books and me…we go way back.  My mom loves to tell me about when I was three and she was pregnant with my little brother; twice a week we’d go to the library and stagger home with massive stacks of books.  We’d snuggle on the couch together and read all day until we both succumbed to the inexorable pull of the mid-afternoon sleep.

Now, books are my favorite thing to give and receive.  Eric is always begging me to remember that right down the street there’s a library that gives away books for free.  Libraries ARE awesome, but there’s nothing like cracking open a book so fresh that it keeps trying to slam closed on you.  There’s nothing like writing your name inside that front cover, or on a bookplate, as the case may be.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of bookplates.  I’ve made a few that I’ll share with you now, but there are so many more to come.  I started with a loopy cursive one for my friend Susan, who loves books too.  I made another version of this for my mother, too.  I know they’ll put them to good use.

I went a little nuts with there.  I got so excited about the many different paper/ink color combinations, that I made them  enough bookplates to last them the rest of their lives.  They’ll have no fear of book snatchers or cases of ownership mistaken identity.

I also made Susan this snarky mermaid bookplate.

Her version had her name in blue coming out of the water at the bottom of the print.

For my brother, who now that he’s out of college explains to us that “he reads” when we ask what he’s doing with his time, I made a little version of him.  He’s cosy in a library armchair, complete with glasses and cowlick…though I’ve never seen him wear a bow tie.

His version has his full name printed at the bottom.

And finally,  the last one I’ve made so far is this image of people dancing around the fire in the woods at night.

I think a bookplate can make any book into an heirloom.  It definitely elevates it somehow, when you care enough to label it this way.  Any book given as a gift gets like, ten more gift points if it includes personalized bookplates as well.

And finally, a confession: occasionally when someone lends me a book i think subconsciously, “Well, they’re not asking for it back, they must not care about it. I better just keep it til they ask.”  Rude, right?  Really, they probably just forgot who they lent it to.  I do that so much that I’ve started making people sign my books out on a notepad posted on my book shelf. But I think the solution really lies in…BOOKPLATES.

Check back for more bookplates soon, and in the meantime, wander on over to Etsy to see the latest additions to my shop.

Lake house sign

This photo was taken halfway through painting a sign that was a Christmas present for my mother-in-law, Linda.  It’s for the lake house on Lake Skaneateles in the finger lakes region of New York.  We’ve been fortunate to go there for a week two summers in a row now, and its always a wonderful time filled with fresh food and fantastic dessert and sailing and reading and exploring.  I’ll post a picture of the finished sign another time…I forgot to take one before I packed in the box to send off.  We just made it to the UPS office before they closed…and that was with me using a hair-dryer to dry the paint.

The final version is painted a reddish color, with more lettering above the fox.   Linda specified all the wording for the sign.  The bottom lettering says, in French, “One Dreams Here.”