domicile

Looking for great tunic pattern recommendations

After a recent trip to San Francisco, where I did my fair share of window shopping but was very restrained on the spending front due to some big bills we're facing, I have been re-energized to sew again. It's been a long time since I've really sewn much, my time being much more devoted to work lately (where lately equals the past several years), but I'm really feeling the itch. I was particularly inspired by this Sunhee Moon tunic, which I LOVED but couldn't justify buying when I have a room filled with lovely fabrics languishing in the basement. So now I'm looking for great, simple tunic patterns. The one shown here, which I found at Sew Mama Sew, is a great one, but I'm wondering what else is out there. Anyone have a great, simple and flattering tunic pattern they'd just love to share?  I know several of you are rather handy with a needle and thread... (Oh and if you've sewn this Anna Maria dress, feel free to send on your thoughts as well).

Orangette's A Homemade Life

I treated myself to a copy of Molly's new book A Homemade Life recently and devoured it with simple joy and delight within days of it arriving. It is, I have to say, the cookbook/food book I've often dreamed of writing (or one of them anyway). For me recipes are stories. And, I hope I don't come off as crazy by saying that there are many recipes that I cook while repeating a story in my head, almost as though I'm trying to ensure I don't forget its origin, retelling a tale in my head in the oral tradition. My handwritten recipe journal of scraps of paper printed out from the web, handwritten notes, recipes copies from and by friends and newspaper clippings often has notes along these lines as well. Everything from a recipe for black bean soup that came to me via a beloved friend I've now lost touch with (she got it from another friend of hers, who she knew in grad school and the recipe has side notes tracing its origin), to "Mom's souffle" recipe, to the recipe for carrot/cauliflower veloute that my parents had on their kind-of-a-honeymoon in Switzerland. The recipes I've created or acquired as an adult all have similar stories attached to them. Stories that for the most part I keep in my own head, repeating subconsciously each time I cook them to myself.

But this isn't about my neurosis, it's about Molly's lovely book, worthy of much praise. Her stories and life journey, held together with recipes and food meditations  offers the reader a little mental journey into someone's life. A life filled with the ups and downs of life, family, joy and tragedy, adventures in Paris, romance and the quotidienne of everyday life. Somewhat ridiculously, I can't speak to any of the recipes as I lent the book out to friend shortly after finishing it, but I regularly use many of Molly's recipes from Orangette (they feature heavily in my scraps of printed out and annotated recipes) and have always enjoyed reading her stories as I add her recipes to my own repetoire. (If you have never made any of Molly's recipes I suggest you start with her Chocolate Apricot Cookie recipe. I can almost guarantee it will win you over and you'll be back for more.)

Thinking about a new Spring bag

Etsy Buy Handmade domicile

Life is lots of work lately (though we've hired two delightful, smart and fabulous people who will be helping to lighten the load), some around-the-house work (mostly in the form of garden restructuring), and daydreaming about Spring finally arriving. I'm on the lookout for a new bag as my beloved AstroSatchel is getting a bit worn around the edges. I've been getting positively lost in Etsy bag searches lately and spending way too much late night time surfing through endlessly wonderful options. In honour of having just finished Margaret Atwood's Payback and a desire for a new relationship to money I'm changing my approach to spending and actually saving for a bag before I buy one (how novel), so we'll have to see what options are still around and how much I can squirrel away over the next while before I make a final decision. Anyone have a favourite they want to sway me towards?

Babycakes The Cookbook

I already posted about this over at the book site, but I can't resist spreading the goodness:

BabyCakes, the Book of Recipes: It’s Here! from BabyCakes NYC on Vimeo.

How great was that? BabyCakes Book of Recipes comes out in May (but you can pre-order now and don’t forget to pick up another copy of The Boss of You while you’re there). Honestly, as fellow author, getting that first box of books before they hit shelves feels exactly like that (or it did for me).

Lovely Things & Thoughts of Spring

Some things that have made me smile on ye olde internets this week:

• The super awesome Megan and Scott are getting married! Read a bit about it here and read her thoughts on Prop 8 here.I could not be more sincere when I tell you I'm just thrilled for those crazy kids.
• Is there anything cuter than this? Ok, maybe this is.
• I'll admit I'm a bit (ok a lot) of a cynic when it comes to politics but man that Obama guy is chipping away at that steadily, and now the super fantastic Mayor Gregor Robertson here in Vancouver, along with his team of stars, is on its way to turning me into Pollyanna. What with the Community Garden planned for the lawn at City Hall and the plans to approve backyard chickens I'm falling in love with this city all over again.
• Speaking of love, I kind of love this dress. A lot. But I may be being unfairly swayed by the awesome shoes it is shown with and the fantasty of springtime dress and sandal wearing. And, on a more local shopping front (for me), the Smoking Lily gals already had me with the design of this dress, but the description? Sold. Read for yourself: "We are dreaming of being on a warm Italian seashore sipping lemoncello(sp?) right now instead of this extreme cold snap we are having. So we took our sweet seahorse top turned it into a dress, add a key hole, made it in a stretch cotton poplin and voila! Il sole è il tasto al mio cuore!"
• And speaking of Anthro-lovin', Alex has a lovely post up this week on negotiating technology in a balanced life. I happened to read that same passage in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle this week and was equally struck by it. Speaking of which, I have a number of thoughts on that book that I plan to share here soon, along with some ruminations on this year's garden plans.

Deluxe Greenhouse Gardening

At Seedy Saturday this afternoon, I had a chance to once again check out SunPod's deluxe FSC certified wood greenhouses and I fell in love all over again. I had a chance to first see a SunPod up at Hollyhock at a business conference last Fall and was pretty enamoured at the time, but as the end of February rolls past and sunny days of summer gardening are the kind of day dreams that keep you warm through winter, I'm really smitten.

While the photos of SunPods are lovely, to experience them in person is really something. They are exquisitely hand made with bent cedar and gorgeous metal hardware. They remind me of the art of hand carved boats or even perhaps a particularly green thumbed hobbit fabrication. The craftsmanship is really something to behold.

You can read all about the SunPod's here. I'm personally smitten with the Smart Vented Mini Greenhouse, which Michael the owner told me he can grow up to 40 heads of lettuce in (the 4' wide version). You can use the SunPod to start your spring leafy greens early, then pick it up and move it over to house your tomatoes and basil, and then move it on the next bed to over winter kales, chards, cabbage, beets, leeks etc over the winter. (All suitable for a West Coast gardener anyway).

I would truly love to bring a SunPod into our yard, but think it may be a bit steep for us this year. I do however, think we'll try making a less fancy version this year and if I can take to greenhouse and coldframe gardening, then perhaps I'll save up to invest next Spring, though I have to admit it's the promise of keeping winter veggies warm and thriving that makes it even more seductive to me.

(The SunPod site also has some great resources on organic, container and greenhouse gardening).

Consumer Indulgence

I succumbed to the Orla Kiely for Target pull
Originally uploaded by emira

Last Sunday morning, as the rain set in for the day, I decided I could not resist the pull of Orla Kiely's line for Target and drove down to Bellis Fair (just across the Can/US border) to see what I could snag. What I hoped would be a quick trip, turned into a bit of a long drawn out affair, thanks to the border crossing. I am 100% convinced that those new signs they have on the highway that tell you the traffic at each crossing are 100$ lies. I'm also now officially convinced that there is an evil time vortex at the Pacific Truck Crossing border that turns a 30 min wait into 2 hours every. single. time. Anyway.

Down to the land of malls I did go and stuff I did buy. I was a bit disappointed with the kitchen wares to be honest. I wasn't expecting everything to be plastic/melamine type stuff (except for some of the mugs and the canisters all the plates, bowls etc were plastic). I really wish the large bowls had been ceramic as I'd have loved one of the pear bowls and think they would have gone excellently with my fiestaware, but really: I don't need more plastic bowls and am in fact trying to move away from plastic stuff in general. I was pretty smitten by the linens though and snatched a bunch of tea towels (as an aside, I think I may have a small tea towel "issue" as my collection is getting slightly out of hand), a lovely flower pattered table cloth that I plan to shorten and make napkins out of the excess, and one of the covered boxes (the blue one you see here). Oh, I also snagged one of the pear/apple aprons even though I have a rather lovely apron I made myself, cuz I really couldn't resist the print.

All in all, the Bellis Fair Target was pretty darned low on Orla Kiely wares. It was mostly picked over. I'm not sure if they'll be restocking or if this is a one time thingy, as I'm not so familiar with the ways of Target.

Mediations on mediation

new half moon zafu
Originally uploaded by emira

A few weeks ago now (nearly a month) a trusted advisor told me, in no uncertain terms, that I need to learn to meditate. Now.

I've been told before that meditation would do me a world of good, and I've always theoretically believed this to be true. I say theoretically because, to be totally honest, I spent many years believing that meditation -- namely the idea of calming your mind (or heaven forbid ridding it of all thought entirely) -- was actually about one breath away from death. Sound dramatic? Perhaps it is, and I never really rationally held this thought, but as an over-achieving, driven and cerebral person, the idea of clearing my mind of thoughts seemed like the antithesis of what I generally strive for day in and day out. Of course, those of you who understand meditation understand that that is kind of the point (and I'm slowly coming around to that realization now myself), but the point was lost on me for the better part of three decades.

The push towards meditation that I got this time really seemed to resonate with me. The woman who was encouraging me to give it a whirl probably wasn't expecting me to laugh in her face and respond with flippant "whatever" that carried all the underlying stress that life brings and my stubborn belief that there's not much that can be done to change that. She responded, very patiently, by reminding me that meditation is truly a practice. You're not supposed to get it right from the start. I guess that was the second part that always turned me off of meditation: the idea that you have to practice sitting and breathing. Seriously? I'm generally a person who strives to do most things that I do really well. The idea that I would need to practice sitting and breathing kind of struck me as a bit embarrassing to be honest.

Still, this woman's response stuck with me. And after mulling it over for 48 hours I decided I would give it a whirl. Afterall, I really had little to lose in the proposition. And so, I committed to myself to sit for 10 minutes (I set a kitchen timer) every morning right after I get up. Just 10 minutes. My rationale? It can't really hurt, and to sound all Oprah-you-go-girl-ish: I kind of owe this to myself. After a week, during which most days 10 minutes was fairly easy but a few were littered with me checking the timer slyly (so that no one would know I was cheating?) out of the corner of my eye every 45 seconds, I felt like maybe this was a possible option for me after all. It's been hard. Hard on mornings when I've worked late the night before and I feel like I need to get into work to get back at it as soon as possible. Hard on mornings when I'd rather stay in bed just a little bit longer. But, each time I tell myself "it's just 10 minutes."

The second week was a bit strange. I don't know if this is normal, but during the second week I was a crabby MOFO. I felt like this exercise of sitting and calming myself every morning was actually unearthing all kinds of anger and frustration that wanted to take over. And for that week, they kind of did. The next week, things were a bit easier again. And, after three weeks of meditating on a cushion grabbed off the couch I decided to invest in a meditation cushion of my very own (the very lovely zafu pictured here which is from Half Moon Yoga here in Vancouver. I have nasty tight hamstrings so the cushion makes it much more comfortable to sit.

This last week of meditating I've actually been really enjoying it thoroughly. As Spring comes to the West Coast some mornings during the mere 10 minutes that I sit, I'll close my eyes to the view of a last sliver of moon on the horizon and open them to the red of the sunset and chirp of the first birds. This morning, a Saturday so I was up a bit later, I sat with the sun streaming in and warming my face.

I'm very tempted to do research online, to buy books on meditation and to try to "get better" at this as quickly as possible. But I'm holding myself back. For the time being I'm just going to stick with the sitting. The sitting and breathing and trying to clear my mind (never really succeeding for more than a few breaths). For now, that seems like enough.

domicile on Design*Sponge

sneak peak domicile
Originally uploaded by emira

We're pretty tickled to be featured on Design*Sponge's sneak peaks this week. In fact so tickled that it just may have nudged us into getting back into blogging here. In the comments (which were all lovely, thank you!) most folks asked for more detail about the furniture that Martin makes. We've long thought about producing some how-to guides for a lot of Martin's furniture projects as most are quite simple. This is an often tossed around idea in the early stages of a new table/couch/bench/shelf/bed project that gets abandoned when the project is complete and Martin has burned out his enthusiasm/energy for it. That said, seeing some of his work through other people's eyes has reinvigorated me. So over the coming weeks, as time (and my broken camera) permit I'll be doing my best to pass on details about a few of his stellar DIY furniture pieces in our home so that you can perhaps recreate them.

Camera Advice & Reviews

I've been awfully fond of my Canon Elph (Powershot S400) since I first got it 3 (or was it 4?) years ago. I love it's size, it takes decent photos (particularly since I started playing around with the manual settings), and I get the digital quality I need for my pretty casual use (it's a 4 mega pixel model). The only thing I don't like about it? Twice it has let me down at really inconvenient times. First at SXSW two years ago and now this weekend at Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle. I'm rather bummed that it crapped out on me this weekend as I was so inspired by UCU, and also spent time with (and met some new) friends whose lovely smiles I would have loved to bring home in my pocket. Alas, the first time it crapped out on me (just wouldn't turn on) I sent it back to Canon for repair and with little fuss got it back in pretty reasonable time. Today I went to the Canon website to arrange sending it back for repair again (this time it turns on but the viewfinder just shows a blank image, though it will allow me to preview previously taken images so it's not the viewfinder that is done for), but was disappointed to learn that because I'm beyond my warranty the cost for repair would be $149, plus tax and shipping. I'm a girl who very much likes to reuse and repair rather than replace objects, but for $149 one can very nearly get a spanky new camera. So... So, I'm a bit torn as to what to do. I may infact send it back for repair, as I do like my camera, but I've been thinking about getting a digital SLR for a while now and am wondering if now is the time. Or, if perhaps I should just replace this little critter with a newer version. So as I contemplate that (and I've got a while as this will need to be a 2009 purchase), I'm wondering if anyone has a camera they love so much that they think I should know about it as I weigh my options. I'm likely to either go for another compact point and shoot or a fancy digital SLR, so thoughts on either type of camera are most welcome.