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Uh oh....I went to Mexico and forgot all about you my little blog.  Well also my computer  fritzed out when a massive rainstorm  (I think she was called tropical storm Olivet) blew onto my very well covered from above, but still unprotected from the elements when the rain is blowing sideways really hard, keyboard.  And so,while I had limited cell phone action, I still wasn't so plugged in computerwise.  No netflix, no facebook, no blog. It was kind of wonderful.  I spent a lot of time walking and talking to people and did some journaling and printmaking but mostly got really excited about drawing.  May I recommend drawing to the entire world as a means of slowing down and looking and noting and creating order and  world peace?  Dare I dream too big?  Seriously, how about if we all sit down and draw together?  And color things in too.  

Couldn't have been happier to come back to Passionflower and see it all so beautiful.

Ready to color it in and have a fantastic holiday season.

My Reward

They say it's going to be a scorcher today in Eugene.  I'm going to sort through all my orders from New York and review it all and do all the ordering kinds of things I have to do...and work it pretty hard and at the end of the day, this is my reward.  I found a great little swimming hole (okay I guess it's a big reservoir which puts it in a slightly different category) out by Fern Ridge. The view is expansive, the water is refreshing but not too cold and I can be home in twenty minutes.  Trying to squeeze it all into these last days of summer.

Falling in Love Again

 

Can you fall in love with a restaurant?  Because I have.  And now we are 3,000 miles apart.

But I have arranged for a menu to be sent of our evening together.  

And when it comes, I will savor each delicious bite.

Visiting Buvette

I'm posting early today because it's a long day of shopping and then I'm going to Buvette for dinner tonight so it's now or never if I'm going to do that post a day. My pal Ted Watson is always raving about it, and besides, with a menu this beautiful, how can one resist?  Although when Ted tells me, "It's really tiny, don't bring a big bag", I wonder just how tiny. Stay tuned for gastronomic reports.

Image courtesy the lovely Buvette whose website you can see by clicking here.

Floral Revelry

We thought it was pretty exciting when this came across our feed:  apparently the ladies from Little Flower School in Brooklyn are coming out our way to teach a design class on working with bearded irises.  They're teaching it at Schreiners -  you know the fabulous iris gardens you see blooming in May,  just north of Salem when you drive up 1-5. We're lucky that way, us florists in Oregon.  We have world class rose growers, and iris, and peony, and hydrangea, and dahlia growers too.  So I think it's great that this talented duo is coming out here to show off some of our Oregon flower love. They're really inspired by the Dutch masters and in fact, Sarah from Saipua (one of the teachers) did my favorite wedding flowers I saw online all year which you can see by clicking here.  Can you guess which part of this wedding was my favorite?

The class is wicked pricey - think a spa weekend in Portland with some fabulous meals thrown in as well.  Still, if you have the inclination, I bet you'll learn a lot and be inspired.  (And who can put a price on inspiration?)  So, if you go, find out for me, which iris it is that smells like root beer.  Because, besides being a ruffly confection of color variations, bearded iris also have amazing scents.

And click here to find out more about the class.

Photo courtesy Little Flower School

Visiting Nest in San Francisco

 Last post about the San Francisco Trip (can you tell I was inspired?) . I always like to do a little research and development which is code for shopping and I wanted to show Jamie some of my favorite little spots and so we went to Nest.  

It's a little jewel box of a store that mixes vintage and antiques with paper goods and books and a lovely little children's section - oh and I spy a rack of clothes and some jewelry too.

 Just the most lovely mix of old and new.  Some of my faves were the gilded  Moroccan leather goods they had, and their chandeliers, and some velvet clothing and vintage earrings from Oaxaca.

It's  in the Filmore shopping district of San Francisco - a really fun neighborhood to shop.

Old Fashioned Sign Painter's Work Popping Up in San Francisco

Do you know how it is when something catches your eye and then you start to see it everywhere?  I started to notice these beautiful handpainted signs in various spots in San Francisco .......and they're something  you don't see too often, because they really are paint to the brush, brush to the board, kind of signs. I still see this in Mexico but not so much in the States.  Plus double love the typography and colorways too.

 

Apparently, "He's a sign painter in the Mission" - which narrows it down ever so slightly. 

I am intrigued.

More Posts from the Golden Gate

 

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, bells going off in my head, in love with the Marketplace at the Ferry Street Bldg in San Francisco.  It's one long walkway of food fantasticness- one great big homage to the small, local, (even slightly obsessed) artisan vendors who lines its halls. 

 

 Honeys, cheese, wines, lavenders,truffles, salami, fish, oils, syrups, and oyster shooters, each booth  a singular vision joined up in a larger whole.  If I wax poetic, it's because, it's pretty wonderful to see a place thrive that supports lots of  people doing one thing and doing it really well.

It's also a huge commuter hub where people go to catch ferries that go all over the San Francisco Bay.  So it's beautiful in that way too because it's by the water.  And they have a farmer's market outside the building three times a week.  I bet that's something.  But I was happy to be able to kind of have it all to myself at a not very busy time of day.  It was so fun to explore.  The mushroom booth was my favorite.

Field Trip to San Francisco and the Fancy Food Show

 I went to the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco to find you some sweet little things - some honeys for your tea and fizzies for your drinks and salts and caramels and  bonbons to tie on packages and pretty little tins and cartons of sweets.

It was so much fun even if it was mobbed.  Busy in a good kind of way.  Everyone was having fun and  sampling and talking food.  (I consider myself a pretty hard core uber buyer, but if I were, say , a cheese buyer, I am not sure how I would have navigated through that show.  There were probably thousands of  cheeses of every shape, size, color, and origin you might imagine...and that was just the cheese world part.)

It was pretty sweet!

Middle of Nowhere Treasure Trove

 

If you're like me, when you travel, you will stop in the most forlorn, tacky, junk shop around, just because, well, you never know what you might find. Unless, of course, you are travelling somewhere that has amazing wonderful antique stores everywhere, in which case you stop there. Sadly, this is not the case on the Oregon Coast.  Which is how I found myself in a very wierd "antique" mall in Newport, Oregon and the shopkeep told me that in Toledo, a mere 8 miles from where we stood, there was a main street lined with antique stores.  "There is?" , I said. (slight uptick in heart rate)

 

 

And so off I found myself on the road to Toledo, which is a whole ethnographic wonderland unto itself.    It's an old lumber town and, surprisingly, still is .  Plus it used to be the county seat so it has a little bit of that beat up backcountry charm with an old hotel and some charming storefronts mixed in with lumbertown grunge. 

 

 

I found a quilt shop and a couple of oddball art galleries, a thrift store that might pass for something old and then, down at the very end of the street, I spied a little something that made my heart go pitter patter.

 

 

Hello best junk shop I've been in in a long, long while and it's out in the middle of nowhere. 

It is the perfect mix of hoarder meets obsessive compulsive disorder. (Notice how the pool balls are all lined up in numerical order!)  Oh and I forgot to mention that half the store is like a steampunk jewelry/art gallery.

 

 

And yes, Becky Tonkin, he does have an entire printer's tray full of various glass, doll eyeballs.

And not to worry, I left them there for you.  :)

 

My little working vacation

 

Best kept secret - January at the Oregon Coast is warm and sunny!  At least the four days I have been here.  Fog rolling in right now. Time to go home!  And tomorrow night I'll be in San Francisco.  Ah, the modern world we live in. 

 

 It's pretty amazing here and I'm not sure why I haven't made coming to the coast a regular part of my routine since it's really right out my back door.  Guess it's just about finding the right spot.

 

Revisiting an Old Friend

 

Uh, oh.....got a call yesterday from a friend who is opening a cider house.  "Would I like to come over and check out his awesome new space and kick around some design ideas?"......"Umm...yes I would." (just as soon as I finish with inventory :))  I find myself excited by this call.

And so this impending visit  has me kicking up my heels and spending entirely too much time persusing one of my favorite all time 'If I were going to design a restaurant websites'  Bobo's Intriguing Objects.  The name Bobo came from combining the first two letters of bourgeois and bohemian!

All Images courtesy Bobo's Intriguing Objects  

The Creative Process

 You know the store is just packed with inventory, and our backroom is overflowing, and there's a ton of Christmas cards that constantly need restocking and well it's just like that.  But I still played hookie the other day and went to a class put on by the Friends of Buford Park on making cordage from nettles. 

Always been on my bucket list - the making cordage part that is.  I didn't know you could make cordage from nettles.  You use the stalk.  It has to cure for 6 months to a year before you can work it. 

Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy going.  It's also tedious but curiously satisfying. 

I really believe getting outside your normal routine is important to the creative process - so I'm hoping, in some ways that I'm not even aware of yet,  that this little cordage class is going to inform my display work at the store.  Who knows? We shall see.

A little walk in the woods....

We have been having a somewhat spectacular, last gasp, days of fall around here, haven't we?

These have been  bike riding, leaf kicking, breath taking , this may be the last sunny day of the year, drink it all in kind of days.  And daylight savings starts tomorrow.

Dreaming a Little of Summer

Sometimes photos really can take you back - like right now I'm dreaming about this warm summer day at Chanticleer Garden just outside Philadelphia, close to where I grew up.

I pretty much like anyplace that has koi. 

And who knew pond scum could be so beautiful?

 It's a well endowed, small, public garden with twelve groundskeepers.  Each of them gets their area to nurture and do as they will (well not exactly like that but there are distinct personalities).  It's  a little quirky with bathrooms fashioned after Japanese teahouses,

 

 

 

 fields of nerine lilies,

 little fairy boxes with plant lists inside, fieldstone staircases, and cottage gardens. 

 

 

 

 

 

 Plus, as I recall, nothing is labeled (hence the plant list boxes)....which I like in a garden.  I find all those tags and names and reading just highly distracting in the garden. 

 

 

 

There's a little something whacky about it and yet  it's really classic too (hello lead mullioned windows on balcony).  I'd go back again.  Maybe at a different time of year.  Come to think of it, would be fun to do a whole tour of gardens of Philadelphia.

I

Fall Flowers that I LIke

 

More shots from New York Now show.....I always see flowers that make me happy.

 

The Mother of all Mothers

 

How outrageous is this piece of jewelry I spied at the Pyrrha booth at the New York Now show?  It's halfway between amazing necklace and breastplate. Let's just say it was so outrageous, they didn't even have a price on it.  In the meantime, I bought a whole slew of lovely Pyrrha miniature pendants which i though would make lovely layering pieces. 

 

 

I think I met my soul sister - except I didn't meet her I just saw her art

 

I'm taking a few days in Philadelphia visiting my family before the New York Gift Show and came upon the work of M F Cardamone while visiting the Barnes Foundation Museum.  (The Barnes merits a whole blog post of it's own, but suffice it to say, if you ever find yourself near Philadelphia and if you are a lover of art, particularly Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, or Renoir, you definitely must go - seriously it's the largest Renoir collection in the world and the  Matisse holdings are pretty extensive too)....but back to the reason for this post.  Ms Cardamone has been an artist most of her adult life and lately she's been collaging these modern day herbariums - that double as infographics too, teaching you about the relationship between man and the plant. (And other things too) 

This one is called Tree of Life.   I am in total awe. 

Click here to go to her website and see more  

Out and About

 Under the headings of "I need to get out more" and "I love my customers" come these two charming  photos courtesy  Sue Prichard.  Sue holds a special place in Passionflower history because she was the real estate broker who first walked around the dirt floors of what was to become my first little store down by the train station.  I think it's fair to say, Sue was there from the start.  Plus Sue has a great eye and she travels and lots of times she sends me photos of storefronts from her trips. How lucky am I?

 Above, a pretty little florist shop display of hydrangea, sweet william and green trix from her recent trip to Austria and Germany.  Plus,  I love presenting flowers in a box.  To me it's perfect wabi sabi - something living and green inside something manmade and recitlinear.

 

 

And despite the glare from the window, I am completely intrigued by this beautiful  homespun display of dried fruit. I love the way traveling can open our eyes to new things.    And I love all the travelers we've been getting coming through the store.  I want them to send pics to their friends too, saying ," check out these photos from my trip through Eugene"

photos courtesy  Sue Prichard

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Almost Ready to Go

 

Did you know I'm going to Mexico?  Oaxaca City and environs to be exact.  You can read all about it here.

It does a girl a world of good to get out and see the world a bit, to shake it up and maybe see and think about things that never occurred to you.   I'm going to make art and seek out some old churches and walk a lot and (big surprise here) do a little shopping.

 

I'm hoping to find a lot of these fun hand embroidered aprons.  Here's Becky wearing one I brought back for her last year!!!  Someone called it a pinafore, which I think is exactly right,   If the shopping gods are smiling upon us, I hope to also have some vintage huipiles (clothing shirts) and cushion covers, and some contemporary table runners.  Plus that certain something out there waiting for me that I don't even know about yet.  But I hear it calling to me.  Stay tuned.  We'll be having a big textile showing on First Friday in April and I'll be showing off my bounty from the Mexico trip.